Patent ID: 7769820

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for determining whether or not web page universal resource locators (URLs) are associated with trusted or fraudulent web sites, comprising: as a user browses the world wide web using computing equipment, obtaining a URL for a web page of unknown authenticity, wherein the URL comprises a second level domain and wherein the second level domain comprises a top level domain; obtaining, with computing equipment, a web site attribute that is associated with the URL and separate from the URL; identifying, with computing equipment, a proposed brand that is associated with the URL using information from the URL and information from the web site attribute, wherein identifying the proposed brand comprises: extracting proposed brand text from the URL by discarding the top level domain from the second level domain; and comparing the extracted proposed brand text with the information from the web site attribute to identify the proposed brand; querying, with computing equipment, a search engine to determine whether the proposed brand is legitimately associated with the URL, comprising: directing the search engine to produce a link count of how many web links exist to the second level domain; and directing the search engine to produce a ranked list of which second level domains contain the proposed brand; and computing, with computing equipment, a Boolean trust factor using the link count and the ranked list.