Environment

Working Up a Black Search: Google's Energy-Friendly Homepage

by Jordan Yerman | May 11, 2007 at 07:35 am

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UPDATE: This is looking pretty hoaxey... hence the "fishy" flag...

This is one for the never-would-have-thought-of-this department, but here it is: since activating the pixels in a computer's display uses electricity, and Google's home page is mostly white, a great deal of electricity is getting used just for searching. When an environmentalist blogger blogged this, Google found out and launched a less power-hungry home page... called Blackle. Think of it as the Prius to Google's white-screened Hummer.

Google, which has a white background and gets about “200 million queries a day” could reduce global energy use by 750 Megawatt-hours a year by simply changing the color of its homepage to black. (For more detailed calculations and assumptions check out the original post here.)

In response to this post a black version of Google emerged called Blackle.com. According to Blackle’s homepage at publication time, 4,408.917 Watt hours have been saved by. The site encourages users to “make a difference today [by] … Blackling "energy saving tips" or visit[ing] treehugger.com a great blog dedicated to environmental awareness.” Nice ideas. But how does the search measure up? Very well indeed. Give it a whirl yourself and start saving energy one search at a time.

I searched Blackle for "mooninites"(see photo), and came up with a great many results very quickly, so it seems to work just fine. The benefits of saving pixel-expenditure would really show via scale: lots and lots of people would have to use Blackle for there to be a palpable difference.

--> At the moment, Blackle seems to be down! We keep getting 403 errors, but I promise that this really exists...

Disclosure: I don't work for Google.

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Jordan Yerman

flagged this story as Fishy

at 09:23 on May 11th, 2007

I'm keeping an eye on this one... it may be a hoax. If the 403 error is from exceeded bandwith, that a big red-flag: Google has pa-lenty of bandwidth. We'll keep you posted.

babblingdweeb

at 09:34 on May 11th, 2007

Well...not really, but kinda.

Google does not own this domain, Mikibo
in New South Wales Australia does.
This only affects CRT monitors -not LCDs (gaining in popularity)
LCD monitors on their own use less power than CRTs, although they are still "warm" (meaning, there is always power running to them while plugged in)

According to wikipedia it actually takes more energy to black out a pixel than it does to make it white. If you dig into the meat of the article on wiki...the backlight on an LCD is always on, but to make it black you need to block light from a given pixel. I know, it's crazy complex!

Further, I'm a little torn on the numbers from Mark Ontkush -some of them are not quite adding up. As one person note: not all monitors consume the same amount of energy (just speaking CRTs) -additioanlly I feel that there is a greater difference in energy usage based on refresh rates on CRTs, higher rate using more electricity.

I'm not an electrical engineer though -so what do I know! :)

natty5454

at 10:39 on May 24th, 2007

Yeah I'd say there is a 99.9% chance this is a hoax...well, they never really say "we are google," but they are clearly trying to make people think it is. Check out the copyright at the bottom of the page (instead of (c) google). And you are missing the most obvious point that IF this was google, they would definitely include all of their other services (mail, maps, news, and so on) on this page. Since they aren't doing that, why would they "encourage people to make this their homepage"? I'll also point out that when you do a search, all of the stuff listed there is exactly what you get with google's affiliate advertising programs (look at the top - it says search "Blackle" or search the web...google's site does not function like this - only their affiliate advertising programs do).

So yeah...definitely a sneaky hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. For shame on "Heap Media" for trying to deceive people.

Oscar Santander (not verified)

at 16:05 on May 31st, 2009

Blackle.com ("Blackle") is a website owned and operated by Heap Media Pty Ltd ("we", "our", "us").

We are strongly committed to protecting your privacy while interacting with Blackle.

Our goal is to provide you with a satisfying experience while allowing you to control your privacy and to give you a means to voice any questions or concerns you may have.

The Blackle search service is powered by Google Custom Search ("Google"). You should read Google's privacy policy at:

http://www.google.com/privacy.html

We do not exercise control over the sites displayed as search results or links from within Blackle. You should read their privacy policies.