GREEN WEB SEARCH: A SWICKI IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

It can be pretty frustrating to search for eco information on the web. Even if you’re interested in something basic, like “greening” your house. Say you fancy making some modest changes to reduce its carbon footprint and increase its self-sufficiency. You logically Google the term “green house,” expecting to find a wealth of material on how to install solar panels and water conservation toilets. Instead, you get 19 pages of links that reference the term “green” in other contexts of the word. So you learn how to build a Victorian greenhouse…and how greenhouse gases are warming the earth…but you’ll have to Google less obvious terms like “greening house” or “house green,” to get the home improvement advice you’re really looking for.

Green Web attempts to address this predicament. It’s a swicki, which is a customized search engine, and it’s dedicated to gathering and prioritizing green information on the web. Green Web relies on the collaborative input of its users, who can “vote” on an entry by clicking a plus or minus sign, and thereby move that entry up or down the listing. Vote tallies are posted next to each entry.

Standard swicki features on Green Web include a “Comment Box” for users to post on a particular search, and a “Hot Searches” box, which is a sampler of recommended search terms. Some of these “hot searches” are unexpected, if not odd, though they’re based on user popularity. For example, alongside “green architecture” and “eco-organic” are bizarrely tangential terms like “tae bo” and “yoga mats.”

This quirky combination of high and low makes for entertaining browsing, but Green Web’s search and sorting ability can also deliver spot-on results. Type in “green house” on Green Web, and you’ll instantly access a treasure trove of helpful eco-oriented material. Unlike Google, this web tool speaks your language. Up pop links to catalogs with products for greening your home, an article on the “green” church architecture movement, another on organic gardening and one on solar roofing, and a video tour of the 2008 “Ultimate ‘Green’ House” contest winner. Bingo.

The occasional missteps in Green Web’s search results are due to its swicki reliance on user frequency and user voting, which puts the most popular entries at the top of the result list. This can lead to some off-topic segues, but at least they have a green twist. For example, a search for the journalist Will Potter (who covers environmental activism) brings up a dozen articles on Harry Potter before anything concerning Will Potter appears. So you may get pleasantly sidetracked, reading eco-minded pieces on Harry Potter, even though they’re not remotely related to your search. You may find it interesting that the publishing industry’s green revolution was jumpstarted by J.K Rowlings, when she learned that each Harry Potter installment uses 250,000 trees, and decided that the last one would use recycled paper. Following this kind of quirky chafe, however, the wheat awaits—a comprehensive list of Will Potter’s writings and website.

Aside from Green Web, there is at least one other worthwhile green search engine, www.greenmaven.com. The latter is a smartly packaged website rather than a swicki, so it lacks the user interaction that makes Green Web so personal and charmingly eccentric. As adjunct tools for environmental research, both searches deliver an abundance of valuable green information. But if you have the time and inclination for perusing an eclectic body of eco material, Green Web is a good place to start.