GoodGuide.Com was an online web, iPhone app and Android app tool which enabled consumers to retrieve evaluations of the health, environmental, and social impacts of consumer products such as

toys A toy or plaything is an object that is used primarily to provide entertainment. Simple examples include toy blocks, board games, and dolls. Toys are often designed for use by children, although many are designed specifically for adults and pe ...

food Food is any substance consumed by an organism for nutritional support. Food is usually of plant, animal, or fungal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is inge ...

, and detergents. "GoodGuide is taking a break. The GoodGuide site will be offline beginning June 1, 2020." This is the message displayed when clicking on any link to GoodGuide. Through its website, online toolbar and smartphone application, GoodGuide provided tools for consumers to make purchasing decisions on the basis of the health, environmental and social impact of a product’s life cycle. These products are designed to provide consumers with this information right at the point of sale, to help them to apply their values to their purchases. The GoodGuide

smartphone app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on des ...

read the

bar code A barcode or bar code is a method of representing data in a visual, machine-readable form. Initially, barcodes represented data by varying the widths, spacings and sizes of parallel lines. These barcodes, now commonly referred to as linear or o ...

s on product labels using the phone's camera, and provides a summary of the product's score according to GoodGuide's rating system.

History

GoodGuide was created by

University of California-Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

professor

Dara O'Rourke Dara O'Rourke is an environmental scientist, information scientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he holds an appointment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. He is also the foun ...

, originally under the name Tao-It. As an

internet startup The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

, GoodGuide raised $3.73 million in its first round of funding reported January, 2009 and $5.5 million in its second round reported June, 2009 from

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

ists. As of May 31, 2010, according to

Alexa Internet Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock. ...

the website ranked about 50,000 worldwide, but about 20,000 in the United States. In December 2009 testing of

Zhu Zhu Pets ZhuZhu Pets (, formerly known as Go Go Pets in the UK) is an American line of plush robotic hamster toys created by Cepia LLC in 2009. Multiple spin-off toy lines, including ZhuZhu Puppies and Kung Zhus, have been released. History ZhuZhu Pet ...

done by GoodGuide reported more than the allowed level of the toxic metal

antimony Antimony is a chemical element with the symbol Sb (from la, stibium) and atomic number 51. A lustrous gray metalloid, it is found in nature mainly as the sulfide mineral stibnite (Sb2S3). Antimony compounds have been known since ancient time ...

in the toy Mr. Squiggles. After doing a review, regulators from the

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (USCPSC, CPSC, or commission) is an independent agency of the United States government. The CPSC seeks to promote the safety of consumer products by addressing “unreasonable risks” of inj ...

said that the toy was within the "very protective" Federal mandatory standard. GoodGuide subsequently was forced to issue an apology saying their testing methods were different from the federal standards.

Ratings

For each listed product the site generates three ratings: a health rating, an environmental ratings, and a social rating. GoodGuide databases include the energy and resource consumed plus the pollution produced in manufacturing the product, the nutritional value of foods, the agricultural and animal husbandry practices, and the corporate sponsorship of social and political philanthropy.

Reviews and awards

GoodGuide was a final jury selection for

TechCrunch50 TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately ...

in September 2008.

Notes

External links

This is the historic site but is defunct since at least 2020 (as of 2/2022)
GoodGuide.Com
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200109005724/https://www.goodguide.com/ , date=2020-01-09 Android (operating system) software Consumer guides IOS software Online companies of the United States American review websites

History

Ratings

Reviews and awards

See also

Notes

External links