Blackle – The Energy Saving Search Engine
Last Updated on
I’ve been meaning to blog about Blackle for months, and finally with a bit of free time (and jet lag) I finally can.
Blackle was brought to my attention when I was travelling round London and a couple of guys on the tube were talking about an “energy saving search engine“. At first I tried to figure about how it would work, and then decided to find out more about Blackle over a Starbucks Gingerbread Latte (very good and only available over Xmas – try one!).
Blackle is powered by Google Custom Search, but provides results against a black screen with white writing, so as to save energy. Great idea.
According to ecoIron, a white web page uses around 74 watts to display, whilst an all black web page uses around 59 watts. Depending on the level of usage, the Blackle team hope to save 750 Megawatt-hours a year.
As I write this post Blackle has saved 328,314.890 Watt hours. Good work guys!
Each time Blackle is loaded vs another search engine, you save energy. Whilst this is good in theory, I doubt many will step away from the main Google search engine.
The Carbon Neutral Search Engine also offers black background search using Google Custom Search but offsets a minimum of 100g of CO2 per search. This is the equivalent to 220W per search in electricity generating terms. It could power a 9W CFL bulb for 24hrs.
I’m using at the moment http://www.blackoogle.us, which is similar to blackle but offers a lot more functionality like image search, youtube search, mail access, etc. And looks nicer too, give it a try!
usa:
http://www.blackoogle.us
uk:
http://www.blackoogle.co.uk
bye 😉
I use darkole.com it is a dark mode search engine….the results are very similar to google and its just as fast.