Trust and Credibility Analysis of Websites

Abstract

Trust on any online information is psychosomatic and hidden by nature. The choice is in the hands of the information seeker to consider, evaluate, and confirm the contents of the websites before using it. This makes a sharp concern for websites dealing with sensitive topics like health, research, or academics. There is no benchmark or tool that tells or characterises about making these “trust” decisions. Although web users make such decisions after considering numerous factors, still there are no such criteria to fulfil the underlying principle to deal with such decision making. This chapter is an effort to resolve the problem of how to measure the content provided by any website in terms of its credibility. Various models have been projected in this chapter to identify several factors pertaining to the credibility of content and users' trust on any website and accordingly analyse the identified factors to assess the websites.