Search & Browsing
Search
Outfoxed augments the normal search rankings with reports from your informer network, which enhances searching by solving two important problems.
The first problem is the phenomena of Google Bombing. Days when the number of incoming links to a page could be used to estimate a page's importance are long gone. (See Google's Patent) Search engines are getting clogged with useless and irrelevant pages, but that somehow manage to get a high position in search results. With Outfoxed, these pages can be reported as low quality by others in your informer network, and these reports will cause these pages to be moved lower in search results.
The second problem for searching is that a page which is relevant for you may not be so relevent for someone else. Current search engines work on the assumption that there is one most relevant page for each query, regardless of who is making the search. Outfoxed gives priority to reported pages in proportion to how close the informer is to you. So if you do a search for "Thailand", and a close friend of yours has a blog with photos of her Thailand vacation, your friend's page moves very high in your search results. This page is very relevant to Thailand from your point of view. (Note: At present, Outfoxed can only re-order the results of a search page. Better integration with search engines is needed to achieve this ideal goal.)
Browsing
While you are browsing, Outfoxed indicates the status of the current page on a button next to the location bar. Clicking on this button display of the report sidebar, which displays all reports on the currently viewed page. Additionally, whenever you navigate to a page rated as dangerous, a confirmation window gives you a the full report (including who gave the report) on the page and asks if you really want to go there.
Outfoxed can also indicate the status of all links on the page. By default it only highlights the dangerous ones, by putting a thick red border around them. For example, if you had Outfoxed installed, and had me as an informer, any link to Claria (like on the previous page) would look like this: Claria