How to know everything about a web site

Do you want to know what people say about a web site in terms of security, reliability and privacy? It’s not just a matter of curiosity: having user ratings on websites can save you lots of time and trouble. There are many services you could try to know more about the number of visitors a web site has, the server location, the visitor location, etc. We have found one though that includes all the information you might need to know about a web site: WOT.

This is a Firefox and IE add-on that adds a colored ring near the home page button of your browser. This lets you know easily, by changing color, if a web site is trusted, safe to use and whether the general reputation among end-users is good. You can also add your own rating by clicking the colored ring and give your score on trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. If you click on the “View scorecard for rating details” option, you’ll be able to write a comment and read what other people have said about that website.

What about all that useful hidden data you wanted to know? In the rating details page, the application displays the references found for a website on other sites. In this page you will also find the ‘Whois’ function which provides interesting information about indexed, registry and server data. You can even find a physical address behind a web site, which can be extremely useful, for example in cases of commercial fraud.

Other services that provide you information about websites are:

WhoIsTheOwner.net – If you want to know the contact address, email and phone number of the website owner, this free service will help.

WhoIsHostingThis.com – Enter the URL of any website and this online service will display that site’s hosting details.

SocialMeter.com – This service helps you determine the popularity of a web page on social sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, etc.

Popuri.us is for estimating the relative popularity of a website with ranking data and inbound links from sites like Compete, Quantcast Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, etc.

OthersOnline is a Firefox and IE add-on that gives you the list of people interested in a particular website and if they are online, you can chat with them and exchange opinions.