How Search Thresher works overview

Without the extension

Without the extension, the search engine of your choice will return a list of search results with the results at the top belonging to companies that paid the most to be there – these are called sponsored links. Each result contains a title and description with a hyperlink from the title to the site. That’s it, nothing special and no element of trust is associated with any of the Web sites in the search results.

With the extension

The extension places an icon beside each search result. Each icon is hyper linked to a page which provides information about the conformance claims made by the site owner. Generally, this information will be related to industry standards, best practices and codes of conduct that have been adopted by site owners.

Providing this additional information is useful because it means you don’t have to enter each site to see if it conforms to a standard or code of conduct. For example, you don’t have to visit each site to see if they’re accessible or not, you can now find this out from search results.

Different levels of trust

There are currently 3 different icons to help differentiate each level of trust. We’ve chosen to use the traffic light concept as it’s understood universally.

• Green tick signifies that the claims being made by the Web site owner have been verified by a trusted independent third party.
• Amber tick means the site owner is giving you their word regarding compliance with a specific industry standard or code of conduct.
• Red box with an X highlights Web sites that don’t make conformance claims of any kind (using a Content Label).

In our opinion, self-regulation (self-labelling) doesn’t work most of the time, or at least, enable ‘trust’. However, it’s important to support it by allowing Web site owners to make claims about their own content. For example, a label for creative commons is a self-claim.

Before Filtering the Wheat from the Chaff…

The first screen shot shows how O2 demonstrates its commitment and conformance to Web accessibility standards. o2.com has been audited and certified by an independent trusted authority (Segala) in this space - hence the green tick.

The rest of the search results contain companies that do not demonstrate their commitment and conformance to accessibility standards. These companies include T-mobile, Virgin, Nokia and Vodafone - all with a red X.

So, let’s see what happens when users choose to only see the sites which promote their commitment to accessibility!

Show me the wheat only!

The next screen shot shows what happens to Web sites that don’t use a Content Label to demonstrate their commitment or conformance to industry standards or best practices. Even sponsored links disappear from the search results. So, there’s no point in companies like T-mobile spending all that hard earned cash if users choose not to find them.

NB. not only are T-mobile, Virgin, Nokia, Vodafone and all other sites filtered out, but the T-mobile ‘paid for’ link disappears also.