Friday, February 22, 2008

Blackle, A Greener Google!




Blackle, what is it?
With all this Global Warming and pollution going on these days, the people of America have become intent with "green" technology. We think, "Oh well, let's leave it to the private corporations to figure this one out." and leave it at that. With Blackle, everyone with a computer can contribute to the wide-spread mitigation of the pollutification (kudos to our prez) of Earth.


How does it work?
Google gets 2 million queries per day, that's 2 million people times 74 watts it takes for a computer screen to load the Google homepage. That comes down to a total of 148,000,000 watts per day. By inverting Google's white pages into black (monitors use less energy to display a white screen as opposed to a black one), which would instead use approximately 59 watts to display, we would use 118,000,000 watts a day. That's saving a lot of watts!


To search, Blackle uses a Google Custom Search, meaning that any search you type in at Blackle, you will get the same hits as if you search in Google. Basically, Blackle is...well, a black version of Google, hence the name. It is recommended that, if you open your internet a lot, you set Blackle as your homepage, this means, without even starting a web session, you'll already be saving watts. Now isn't that a bright idea!

2 comments:

Artstudio Sri Lanka said...

There are around 22 different versions of “black google” online. The best one I’ve found is www.cleanblack.com. Cleanblack is the only version that allows you to change the text colors of the google search results. Try it yourself by going to www.cleanblack.com/theme/

anthony said...

Hey Artstudio, thanks for the heads up! I think there's also a Greasemonkey script that allows you to automatically invert every page you open. Since so many 'black' alternatives to Google and other sites have sprung up recently, I plan on writing an addendum to this post soon. When I do, I'll be sure to head over to clean black to check it out. Thanks again!