Saving energy, one "BLACKLE" at a time

Uhm, why not just turn off the monitor?... [???]

:))

I'm with Brian. It is cheaper to just use the advance power features built into most computer operating systems that will shutdown the monitor and hard drives after a certain period of non-use.

Though, Blackle may save power while you are actually working. How much power is subject to debate because I never spend longer than 1 to 2 minutes on Google for a search.

Holy Electron batman! It's true, AND significant. I missed the part that you simply substitute blackle for google. Clicking too fast.

So fwiw, here are the numbers for an old Viewsonic E790 19" monitor, a typical CRT:

• Google.com, white-city: 104 Watts
• Blackle.com, black-city: 76 watts

That's reduction of 27%. Cool.

I wonder if I can re-program that in the Firefox search bar...

I suspect that there should be no appreciable difference for LCD users, since the intensity of the backlight remains constant. But now I'm wondering...

Anyway, that was a fun geekout moment with my trusty Kill A Watt.

I prefer http://www.keepglobe.com over Blackle. They donate 50% of revenue to a green cause and it is hosted on a server that is powered by wind and sun energy. They also have an image search. Black search engines do not save energy as they claim and also my eyes twitch after seeing that black background.

I'm afraid that the word Urban Legend is commonly with blackle.com.

Iam betting on "Nuclear Fusion" tech as a future source of energy. High time for folks working on it to get their act together and speed up before lesser mortals like us are literally forced to switch off our monitors as Brian says so as to contribute to the cause of energy saving...

Nuclear Fusion is iffy, I'm thinking generating antimatter would be a lot simpler from a harvesting point of view, plus it creates more opportunities for the safety industry!

"I suspect that there should be no appreciable difference for LCD users, since the intensity of the backlight remains constant...." yup, and the number of people on LCD monitors nowadays is growing...

A more potent energy saver: hope we get a practical leap forward in LED lightbulb outputs soon: far better than CFLs.

But the idea of blacking out a search engine background to save energy makes think of the amusing story of the tech support guy who was told by management to save all word-processing files in the tiniest font, so they'd take up less memory.

You have a point Michael...

There are around 18 different versions of black google online. The best one Ive 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/