Written by Thilde Vesterby
Blackle is a search engine powered by Google – in black instead of the usual white. It’s not new, but I thought it deserves a mention as it is a pretty cool idea. The search engine is inspired by a blog written by Mark Ontkush back in 2007 that claimed that a white screen background clocks up 74 watts to display while a black screen only uses 59 watts – so according to this a black screen equals a saving of 15 watts.
According to Mr. Ontkush, Google receives 200 million requests a day and by going black they could save up to 750 megawatt hours per year! (See the calculations here). That sounds pretty good – and in trying to save energy every little initiative counts.
In the few years that Blackle has been running there has been some discussions about the validity about the black versus white screen claims. Bloggers have been arguing that a black screen uses more energy. I will spare you the techy details, but it has something to do with pixels and LCD…
Regardless of which screen is more energy efficient, Blackle makes us stop and think about our energy consumption and that has to be a start.
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