a darker shade of google

Here's something interesting our Sustainability Jess told us all about on Monday morning...

When your screen is white, be it an empty word page, or the Google page, your computer consumes 74 watts of energy, and when it's black it consumes only 59 watts. A guy Mark Ontkush wrote this article about the energy saving that would be achieved if Google had a black screen. Taking in account their huge number of page views, according to his calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year would be saved.

In a response to this article Google created a black version of its search engine, called Blackle (or black google if you still love the google logo), with the exact same functions as the white version, but with lower energy consumption.

It's great that google are so open to ideas like this and went and implemented it off that back of Mark's idea. Why don't you go and change the bookmark in your browser for Google. I just have.

Comments

[Ewarwoowar]

Before we all get a bit overexcited about this - Blackle only makes a difference if you still have an old school bulky CRT monitor.

It doesn’t matter with LCD screens. The have the same power consumption no matter what they’re displaying – there’s a white panel in the back (the “backlight”) and the pixels control how much and what colour of that light is allowed to pass through.

My Technology manager told me that. And I thought I should pass on the love.

[ted at innocent]

It seems you may be right Ewar:

http://blogs.sun.com/lskrocki/entry/you_know_how_blackle_is

OK, if you've got a big old monitor (like in the ones in the 1983 classic film War Games) think about switching to Blackle. If not just make sure you turn your computer off when you go home tonight.

Interestingly enough most of the computer simulations in War Games were based on a black screen. I imagine this was because LED explosions look much better on black as opposed to early sustainability considerations though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeOHEU7Ykyg

I'm going to switch my computer off now before it starts playing noughts and crosses of its own accord.

It just goes to show that everything isn't black and white. As it were.

[Ginger]

The wiki artcle on it also backs up the fact that it doesn't work on LCD monitors.
It also points out that "Blackle is criticized on the basis that the energy saved by using it instead of Google is insignificant. Shutting down the computer for 15 minutes a day, or putting it in sleep mode saves more energy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackle.com

It's a nice idea, but I don't think it's going to save the planet.

[Mark]

but this will only work while you are on the google website. As soon as you click onto the site you want to look at you are at the mercy of that site.

However, all is not lost... you can change your browser settings.
In IE go to Tools: Internet Options: Colors.
In Firefox got to: Tools: Options: Content: Colours

No need to change bookmarks.