A trust-based rating system is user customizable. It is a system in which the raters remain anonymous. The anonymous ratings mimic real life person-to-person recommendation methods wherein recommendations are personal and cannot be controlled by persons or items being rated. The system uses contextually meaningful rating which are filtered explicitly by the end-user or implicitly based upon the environment of the end-user to facilitate discovery and minimize the potential for fraud and deception. Trust networks are constructed between the participants and the rating filtered or weighted according to the user's relative trust of the raters in the system. Ratings made by the inventive system can be for goods, services, people, businesses or virtually any item that can be rated and/or recommended.
