BrightCloud®, Inc., a security startup building the next generation web filtering URL database, today announced the results of a comparative URL database test conducted by the independent test facility West Coast Labs.
West Coast Labs tested the URL databases of BrightCloud, Secure Computing's SmartFilter, SurfControl, and Websense. Specifically, the quality of the URL database, including both coverage and accuracy, was measured for each vendor.
The results of the test are that BrightCloud's URL database outperformed all other vendors in both coverage and accuracy- in some cases, by a significant margin.
San Diego, CA (PRWEB) May 19, 2007 -- BrightCloud®, Inc., a security startup building the next generation web filtering URL database, today announced the results of a comparative URL database test conducted by the independent test facility West Coast Labs.
West Coast Labs tested the URL databases of BrightCloud, Secure Computing's SmartFilter, SurfControl, and Websense. Specifically, the quality of the URL database, including both coverage and accuracy, was measured for each vendor.
The results of the test are that BrightCloud's URL database outperformed all other vendors in both coverage and accuracy- in some cases, by a significant margin.
"We are extremely pleased to point to third party validation that the BrightCloud Master Database is a higher quality URL database than those of the industry leaders," said Quinn Curtis, CEO of BrightCloud. "As a startup, one of our key challenges is credibility. Third party validation our superior coverage and accuracy is critical to our success. With our commitment to excellence, we are significantly raising the bar for the next generation web filtering."
URL coverage is a simple test, whereby each implementation was queried to determine whether it had the requested URL in its database, regardless of category. If the vendor responded with a category other than "Uncategorized," that response was counted in the vendor's favor.
Coverage was measured across three data sets:
Alexa Top 100,000 URLs- Alexa is a web service offered by Amazon (www.alexa.com). Its rankings are created by analyzing the web usage of millions of users with the Alexa Toolbar installed.
Ranking.com - Ranking.com (www.ranking.com) provides a ranked list of the top 1.5 million authorities. Its rankings are created by analyzing the web usage of millions of users with the Ranking Toolbar installed.
Top 20 Million URLs by Page Rank - Page Rank is a system of ranking that was created by one of the founders of Google, Larry Page. It works using an algorithm that measures pages by the number of hyperlinks to a specific site weighted by the 'importance' of the referring site. The page rank data used in the report were the top 20 million authorities by page rank, and provided by BrightCloud.
BrightCloud's coverage was highest for all three datasets, with over 90% coverage each. The competitive products were in the 80% range, except for the Top 20 million page rank URL dataset tested, where their coverage was 33%.
The Accuracy test was based on URLs randomly selected by West Coast Labs in four categories: Adult, Gambling, Games, and Shopping.
Each vendor's solution was queried for the category of the URL, and a correct categorization was counted in the vendor's favor. It should be noted that both BrightCloud and SmartFilter support multiple categorizations for a single URL. As long as one of the returned categories matched the category defined by West Coast Labs, the response was counted as correct.
In the accuracy tests, BrightCloud again scored highest for each of the four categories tested, and was frequently higher than some of the market leaders by over fifteen percentage points.
BrightCloud's success on the independent third party test is due to the use of their automated and manual URL classification system. BrightCloud uses a Maximum Entropy Discrimination (MED) algorithm- the state of the art in automated text classification. This MED algorithm is not only highly performant, but also very accurate. Coupling the MED automated classification with human and other proprietary classification resources has enable BrightCloud to build the largest and most accurate commercially available URL database, currently at over 45 million URLs.
The West Coast Labs report is available from the home page of the BrightCloud website: www.brightcloud.com.
About BrightCloud
BrightCloud, Inc. is building the next generation web filtering database. BrightCloud provides security vendors with hosted security services that extend the value propositions of web filtering across the internet's Long Tail - the 450 million Websites visited by enterprise customers - which includes both the most popular sites as well as those sites less frequently visited, but visited nonetheless. Target customers include enterprise security vendors in the security appliance, enterprise security application, end point security, enterprise security application, wireless, email, and xSP spaces. BrightCloud uses the latest in machine learning algorithms, as well as human classification, to build the largest and most accurate URL database available. By integrating the BrightCloud services, OEMs can provide their end customers with a richer, multi-layered security solution. For more information visit www.brightcloud.com.
© 2006, BrightCloud, Inc. All rights reserved. BrightCloud is a registered trademark of BrightCloud, Inc. in the United States and certain international markets. BrightCloud has numerous other unregistered trademarks in the United States and internationally. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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