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Saving Wasting energy 1 search at a time

Thanks to my good friend Rocha (read the comments below) who pointed out a few articles / studies about this black screen energy-saving claims. It actually seems like black screens end up using more – not less- energy than white screens… Here’s the original post anyways

blackle

Heap media brings us Blackle, a google based search engine that helps us save energy every time we do a search.

In their own words: 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.”

Since it’s powered by Google, its searches still deliver the same results we’ve come to love…

SOFTlab blackle

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 2:33 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Saving Wasting energy 1 search at a time”

  1. rocha says:
    August 17, 2007 at 5:54 pm

    Hi coche,

    I just found out that you have a blog. I also just found out that you were sick last week. It is good to know that you are feeling better now.

    Anyway, Blackle only saves energy if you are using a CRT monitor. In any case there are far better ways to save energy on a computer than just showing black pixels. Lowering the brightness or reducing the refresh rate are significantly better. Even better, use the energy saving features of your operating system.

    Someone actually did the measurements:
    http://techlogg.com/content/view/317/
    http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/does-a-darkened-google-really-save-electricity-104/

    Google comments on Blackle:
    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.html

    Blackle is another cute idea that doesn’t work in practice.

  2. coche says:
    August 17, 2007 at 6:02 pm

    Welcome to the blog Rocha. Its quite a pleasure to have you here. Please make it yours as you wish!

    I figured Blackle wasn’t going to save the world anytime soon, but as you said, its a cute idea.

    Thanks for the post

    C

  3. rocha says:
    August 17, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    It turns out that in some cases it actually uses more energy. Personally I think it is a sort of scam. Blackle makes money using Google’s Co-op program, which means they get paid by Google every time someone uses them. Since people use Blackle thinking they are saving energy (which is not true), Blackle ends up making money based on a false claim. They are many examples out there of people who do the same thing.

  4. coche says:
    August 17, 2007 at 7:16 pm

    I was just reading that in the google blog too!