Green is the new black
by Heidi Edelmuller
Earlier this year a tree-hugging blogger called Mark Ontkush posted the following comment on his site, ecoIron: “an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts.”
Ontkush immediately thought of search giant Google. With over 200 million page views a day, Google is one of the most visited (and whitest) sites on the Internet. Google’s clean landing page has often been suggested as one of the reasons it became such a popular search engine in the late 90’s. While competitors like Yahoo! were trying to cram as much as possible onto their landing page, Google’s minimalist search page was refreshingly simple and uncluttered.
After a few calculations Ontkush worked out that if Google changed their white display to black, the world would save about 3000 Megawatt-hours and $75,000 in electricity a year! Not bad for a simple change of colour.
Google, despite their “Do No Evil” philosophy, never responded to the suggestion and didn’t change the colour of their famous landing page. Distraught hippies everywhere were forced to continue using Google’s energy-guzzling service and feel guilty about the deforestation and global warming they were inadvertently causing.
That is until an Australian company called Heap Media came across Ontkush’s post and decided to set up a Google Custom Search Engine with an all-black display. Blackle.com uses Google's search algorithm so should the return identical search results as Google.com, but with a less harmful impact on the environment.
That’s good news for tree-hugging geeks (there are a few at Quirk) and also good news for Heap Media who could make a packet out of Google’s Adsense program if Blackle.com continues to gain popularity. Let’s just hope Blackle.com are being true eco-geeks and are donating all Google Adsense proceeds to Greenpeace.
Comments
post a commentYou're right Uno - the fact that monitors these days are LCD rather than CRT means that this argument is becoming less and less relevant. Personally I suspect these guys are in it more for the Adsense revenue than anything else (Damn - why didn't I think of it first?!?)
Like you said, its never a bad idea to be reminded to think green. I'm not sure if I could face black screens all day however - in which case its my eyesight, rather than the environment that will be suffering ;)
Posted by Heidi on 2007/07/16
I sit here basking in the soft glow of my LCD screen, content in the knowledge that my evil CRT earth-destroying days are over.
I still drive 40 km to work everyday though, making a nice long carbon footprint in my Ford Laser all the way along the N12. Bring on the electric car, I say...
BTW, I have an idea. How about you make this website where you charge a dollar for every pixel of advertising and call it something clever, like say, www.milliondollarhomepage.com.
Oh..oh...I see...doh.
Posted by Tony on 2007/07/18
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If you go down further in the comments you'll see the discussion turns around CRT vs LCD monitors (A black Google has no effect on LCD monitors). So the impact of a black Google is practically nothing.
The Digg discussion is quite useful as well, even if it is full of the normal "You're an idiot" type comments :)
Still, it's not a bad thing even if it does constantly remind you of your energy consumption. You can always try the Greasemonkey script, that way it integrates seamlessly into your current usage and you can use the Firefox toolbars etc etc.
Posted by Uno on 2007/07/16