Web site verification service

摘要

A user who is browsing the web may use a web site verification service to ascertain whether a web site that appears to be associated with a trusted entity is actually associated with that entity. The web site verification service retains the URL of an unauthenticated web site. The user types a text string naming the entity that the user believes should be associated with the web site into a text box. A database such as an internet search engine database or a database containing a list of trusted entities and their URLs may be queried using the user-supplied text string. The retained URL may be compared to the resulting list of URLs. If the retained URL does not match one of the URLs in the query results, the user may be warned that the web site does not appear to be associated with the trusted entity.

主权项

1. A method for using a computer-implemented web-site verification service to verify whether or not certain web sites and their universal resource locators (URLs) are associated with trusted entities, comprising:
as a user browses the world wide web using computing equipment, retaining a URL for a web site of unknown authenticity using the computing equipment; presenting an on-screen opportunity on the computing equipment for the user to supply the web site verification service with a text string naming which trusted entity the user believes should be associated with the web site of unknown authenticity; after the user supplies the text string, using the user-supplied text string to query a database with the computing equipment to produce database query results that identify which URLs are legitimately associated with the text string; and with the computing equipment comparing the retained URL to the database query results to determine whether the web site of unknown authenticity is associated with the trusted entity.