Blackle- the black Google

Heard of Blackle? The power saving Google? If not then read on. There’s quite a noise going on about a new power saving technique- using black screens instead of white. Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." - Says a research by Judy A. Roberson.

In January 2007 a blog post titled “Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year” proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages. Here is an excerpt from the blog.

“As noted, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.

Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.”

Even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly, seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

The site encourages you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help us spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: "Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time".

That’s something that makes that makes everyone think. As usual, there’s always a backlash to everything that seems good. The first thing is the statistics. Is the statistics valid? Almost most of the computers use LCD monitors and not CRT. Even 25% as suggested was unacceptable to many. LCD monitors have a permanently on backlight and it doesn’t matter whether we switch the colors from white to black. Moreover LCDs save a lot more power than CRTs. The second is regarding the queries. The queries are not only text but also other forms. But I don’t think that makes a really big difference.

Whatever people may say, I, like many fellow Chennaites, use a CRT monitor, and I shall do my part in saving energy, by “Blackling” instead of googling