ACE, an Automated Credibility Evaluator

ACE is one of several experimental software projects created by the Credibility Commons project. The Commons is creating a series of tools intended to explore the design space of credibility-supporting web software. The Auomated Credibility Evaluator is a web search tool that can automatically evaluate sites on the web based on the credibility signals that they present. ACE uses a set of guidelines that have been created to help people judge the trustworthiness of a site.

Using ACE

ACE can be used to generate a credibility report of any site on the web. Click here to test a web site with ACE. For more information about how ACE works, please see the Documentation.

What can you do with ACE?

ACE is a research project; it's not intended to tell you which sites to trust unquestionably. The web is complex, and evaluating the trustworthiness of web sites still requires human creativity. We hope that it can be helpful to Internet users, and sometimes even fun.

Here are some ideas about how you might use ACE:

• Trying out credibility metrics. ACE is based around a collection of published web credibility guidelines. How well do these guidelines work in the real world? You can use ACE to see cases where these guidelines are helpful and when they are less helpful.
• Learning about web credibility. You can use ACE to test web sites that you visit every day, or to try out a new web site that you aren't sure about. ACE may be able to point out problems in a web site that you might otherwise overlook.
• Beating the game. ACE can find many potential credibility issues on web sites. But it's not perfect. You can test a web site with ACE and see how your own opinion of the Web site compares. If you do find a problem that ACE overlooks, let us know and help make ACE smarter.
• How credible is your web site? ACE is based around a set of published credibility guidelines. Does your web site give off positive or negative credibility signals? ACE can help you identify opportunities to make the information on your website easier to verify.

Research

ACE is a research project from the Credibility Commons, a joint research partnership between the Information School at the University of Washington and the Information Institute of Syracuse University. ACE has been created to explore the effectiveness of automated credibility metrics, and to compare these automated techniques with techniques used by everyday Internet users.

Problems? Questions?

For more information on ACE and other projects from the Credibility Commons, please visit our web site.