ResearchBuzz

A new directory has been launched for green products and services. It’s available at http://www.wecanlivegreen.com/ . In addition to the directory, there’s general green information available as well.

You can browse by state or category, or search by keyword. I did a search for clothing which gave me two categories and four subcategories devoted to clothing. I chose children’s clothing and got seven results. None of them seemed to be devoted completely to children’s clothing, with most of them being general clothes stores. The listings included a picture, store name, and one-lane description. Click on the Find Out More link for additional information about the company, including a Web site address and sometimes e-mail. The additional information is pretty minimal, unfortunately. (I also found that doing general keyword searches worked best.)

In addition to the products and services listings the site also offers forums, a “Green Living 101″ tutorial, and a newsletter. There’s a place for products and an event listing, but those places aren’t populated yet. Interesting but I wish there were a little more store information.

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Catching up … Google recently announced that it was changing the name of Froogle to Google Product Search. Apparently not enough people were getting the pun, or something. Meanwhile, Google Catalogs, which I rather liked when it was launched, continues to quietly molder away in a corner. Unfortunate!

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up is to offer a couple of tips to people who dislike searching Google Product Search as much as I do — or rather did, since I found a way to alleviate the pain. I used to find Google Product Search hard to use, either bringing me too many results or too little. I found that using just one syntax — intitle: — made finding things a lot easier.

Usually what I do is put the general idea of what I’m looking for in the intitle: and then any additional keywords in the rest of the query. So if I’m looking for a red denim jacket, I might try red denim intitle:jacket . Cuts down the search results a lot.

You might want to explore http://www.google.com/advanced_product_search , though I find that the searching by price area is really a crap shoot, especially since you’re also searching eBay auctions. Sometimes the prices are really wacky…

Man, this one’s been in the queue for a long time… Retrevo, in gamma at http://www.retrevo.com/, provides product information. And not just shopping information, but also manufacturer information, reviews and articles, and forum and blog posts. Consumer metasearch? It’s so nice to find a search engine that actually focuses on product information without being overwhelmingly oriented towards buying.

You can do a brand search, or a noun search, or a search by brand and model number, which I found worked best. I did a search for Deskjet 5150 and got results divided into several categories. First there was product documentation (1 result), reviews and articles (19), manufacturer’s info (5), forums & blogs (11), and finally shopping (58), down at the bottom where I don’t have to give into consumerism if I don’t want to.

The results screen is split into two parts. The left has the results, while the right has the pages themselves. You can collapse the page frame if you find it annoying. The results themselves have page titles and usable-length snippets.

There’s a lot of functionality available just using the service as a guest, but if you register on the site (registration is free and requires only an e-mail address) you do get access to additional features like query history and invitations to beta test (or gamma test?) new search features.

There’s a blog about the site at http://blog.retrevo.com/ but it seems to be more about consumer and shopping trends, less on the nuts and bolts of the search engine. Blog aside, I really like this site; it’s going to come in handy next time I have trouble with a really old camera or some printer that lost its documentation long ago, I’m coming here.