A black search engine that says it's green
Blackle, the sort-of energy-saving search engine.
Blackle is a front end to Google that works exactly like Google, but with one difference: Its home page and its results pages are black. Why? To save the planet. As it says on the about page, "Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black." The page quotes a 2002 report that maintains, "a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen."
That makes intuitive sense when you're talking about CRTs, but not LCD monitors or laptops, which power their backlight consistently regardless of the image the LCD in front of them is displaying.
Blackle creator Toby Heap pointed me back to the report (PDF file), which, on page 19, shows a tiny difference between power consumed when an LCD monitor is displaying a white versus a black screen. But his main point is this: "Regardless, the idea of Blackle is for people to be reminded about saving energy every time they search the Web."
If you really want to save power when on the Web, here's my advice. Turn down the brightness of your screen. That's going to make a bigger difference than using Blackle or not. Better yet, don't surf the Web using a PC with an energy-sucking $500 high-end graphics card. Why do you think some gaming PCs now come with 1 kilowatt power supplies?
Blackle does look cool, though. Very ninja.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
2) There is energy used on their side redirecting traffic to google
3) Most new monitors are LCD
4) Time spend on search than actual content sites are minimal
5) Most importantly gives people a false sense of making a difference. Go out there and turn some lights off if you want to save energe (that old CRT is probably only using about 40 watts anyway)
In firefox v2: Tools-->Options-->Content Tab-->Fonts & Colors, click on Colors and switch the Background to black and Text to a light color (white). Then Uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own colors..." then OK, OK and pow- all pages (except flash) are light text on black background. Pretty much the same process in IE. Also, you can set up a light text on black background Windows theme and have all your office applications (word, excel, outlook...) and menus use it. not to mention windowblinds, dark theme skins etc etc. Why is cnet wasting space on this article?
This is almost as silly as the ignorant boobs who think that switching to ethenol will reduce CO2 emissions. (Fact: Doing so will almost double them)
I'm sure that at the end of the day, the silly people who thought this up will walk away from their computers (leaving them on, because booting Windows takes 5 minutes) and then plop down in front of their 60-inch flat screen TVs.
Sanjay