use blackle

blackle is google’s new energy saving search engine. google recently launched this endevour in response to a post on the blog eco iron. the post from january of this year, titled, “google would save 750 million megawatt hours,” hypothesized that if google simply changed the backgound of it’s insanely popular search engine web portal from white to black some 750 million megawatt hours of energy would be saved yearly. the math is simple, google gets 200 million-plus hits a day and, “an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts.” thus blackle was born.   now it’s my understanding that power is only saved when viewing colors through a crt monitor, apparently lcd screen do not discern the difference of color in terms of power used; nonetheless, it’s still a great idea. there’s a great link at the bottom of blackle’s home page that discusses the idea in a little more depth as well as providing some additional interesting tidbits. finally there is a great little counter on blackle’s home page that continually tallies the energy saved by the usage of blackle. “blackle.com – saving energy one search at a time.” every little bit helps.