When you have children, there are always opportunities to learn things that you otherwise might not. For instance Blackle.com.  This afternoon my daughter nudged me when she saw me carrying out a routine search on Google. (Yes Google is still my search engine of choice). She said “If you cared about saving energy with all your online work mom, you’d use Blackle to search.”  Well, being a techy mom and not wanting to be out-witted, I quickly introduced myself to what was entirely foreign to me until she had spoken it.

So what is it?   It is a basic minimal concept towards saving energy – realized by simply changing Google’s custom search onto a black background.  Awesome! Little steps towards a more conscientious tomorrow. I’m all for it!

So, have you tried searching with Blackle.com? What ways are YOU conserving?

How is Blackle saving energy?

Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white or light screen than a black or dark screen.” Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

via About Blackle – Energy Saving Search.

Leave a Reply