Greenzer vs. TheFindGreen - a Landslide!
If you thought Greezner was good, wait till you check out this one. TheFindGreen, in all honesty and brevity, beats out the former green shopping engine in many respects.
User-friendly, well organized, and just simply a better search engine, TheFindGreen gives you better matches on search queries and gives the user more options and more relevant products.
Take, for instance, air conditioners. A simple search for air conditioners on TheFindGreen actually gave me air conditioners. That was a good thing.
See what they offered in this picture:
The first product, a “Solar Chill Evaporative Cooler” seemed really, really, environmental. Though it cost over $3,000, there were other models that were in the hundreds (see the final picture in the post), as well as an adjustable price range bar on the upper left corner of the screen. Most other products were either actually air coolers, or they were related to the cooling of air, such as a solar attic fan, and even a cooling vest for dogs. Not what I was looking for, but entertaining, if I had a dog and wanted to cool him in a cooling-dog-vest.
For Greenzer, a search for air conditioners yielded a single air conditioner at 8,000 BTUs, and nothing about it was that green, and there were no notes indicating that anything about the air conditioner was green. As reported in a previous post about Greenzer, there are notes on the right side of every product found by Greenzer about what makes the product green, and nothing was written there for the air conditioning. The rest of the products Greenzer referred me to had nothing to do with air conditioners. The second product Greenzer referred me to was socks. Now, like most bipeds, I like socks, but I wasn’t searching for them at the time.
TheFindGreen also has a “recent searches” bar at the bottom of the screen, and enables the user to sign up for an account in order to save favorite products and potential purchases on an account viewable from any computer.
However, one advantage Greenzer has over TheFindGreen, is a green score. Greenzer gives a higher score (up to 10) to those products which have a lesser environmental impact. With TheFindGreen, research is not indicated as to how green the product you’re buying is. For some things, like the solar powered air conditioner, the answer is obvious, but for other things such as furniture, you can only rely on the company’s description, with no independent research by TheFindGreen. So unless it’s self-evident, the research will have to be your own.
For a final green demonstration, take a look at the specifics on this solar powered air cooler!
July 25th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Thanks for the post but it seems the examples you are drawing upon are incorrect:
1. “For Greenzer, a search for air conditioners yielded a single air conditioner at 8,000 BTUs.” In fact, a search for air conditioners on Greenzer yields a result page where the first 12 products are air conditioners ( http://www.greenzer.com/air-conditioners_I ). A search for air conditioner, in the singular, yields a result page where the first 24 listings are air conditioners, ( http://www.greenzer.com/air-conditioner_I ).
2. “Thefindgreen gives you better matches on search queries.” On a search for air conditioners on thefindgreen, the first 10 results (see image in post above) include: 1 cooling dog vest, 2 programmable timers, 1 heater, 1 hand air pump for kegs and 1 freezer. These are great products but as the author points out himself, they are “not what I was looking for.”
3. Air conditioners listed on Greenzer are Energy Star certified. We believe this is a significant green attribute compared to conventional air conditioners. In almost all cases, the Energy Star information is actually present in the title of the product, its description or on the retailers’ result page. We will be highlighting this information in the right hand column of the product search page to avoid any confusion and continue to present useful information to users.
We appreciate you checking out Greenzer and hope you will continue to do so as we add new features, products and informative content.
July 29th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Hey Adriaan -
In response to point 1, I ran 3 searches for “air conditioners” in the plural, and each time I got the same list with only one air conditioner at 8,000 BTU’s. It could be that there was a bug that day, or my computer was acting weird, and now it’s working like you said, so I give you that.
As for point 2, in comparison with my original results, TheFindGreen was much more accurate. Finally, point 3, though your products are Energy Star certified, to list that as an important environmental point to your consumers seems like the next step forward, which you say you’re doing, so that’s good. I, for one, only vaguely recognized the certification but didn’t know what the qualifications were for getting it and didn’t know it was a particularly green thing to have for an AC unit.