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Monday, July 02, 2007

Blackle - Black Google saves energy


How is Blackle saving energy?


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.

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.

Office Website: http://www.blackle.com/

1 comment:

Sanjay John Gandhi said...

You might want to note that blackle is just the homepage of www.searchincolor.com, which has offered web search in different colors since a much longer time. In general, all dark backgrounds on light text are energy saving-less illumination of the CRT-less pixel activation.

My favorite on searchincolor.com is the white background with green links-although not energy saving-it is really better for the eyes.

Sanjay