i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Considering the important role of IO and IR in any markets and consequently in the green and sustainability market, one might ask: How effective is searching for green products, services, professionals, or businesses?

Answer to the question above is not clear yet!
Try Googling “Green Carwash in Berkeley”, now try Bing.
Try searching for a “Green Car” on craigslist. Now try it on eBay.

Basically by googling the entries above you will get one carwash that actually is implementing sustainable practices and the rest of the search results are carwashes that have nothing to do with green, sustainability, or environmental credentials!

Searching for green cars, green appliances, or green ‘xyz’ results in tens of results most of which use green as a color: green colored car, green colored dishwasher, etc.
As an Internet user, how would you tag your “green” information? Would you use very technical terms, like PV, or would you prefer to use a standard green vocabulary? How would you look for green information, let’s say green local groceries?

The problems with search on the web become more clear when we look at an urgent set of needs by our society: the need to become more sustainable in the way we live, work, and do business with each other. Is the information infrastructure set up to accommodate this urgent need? Is the vocabulary set sufficient for it? Do we need a new content-specific search engine for this purpose? Or Google, Bing, and other search engine leaders should have already started working on it?

Keeping these sort of questions in mind, what are the requirements and expectations from a “Green Search Engine”? Should they add extra homographs for “green” or should they come up with a new set of vocabulary for the emerged market to meet the urgent need?