Random Thoughts

Google goes black to keep the earth green

What can a website do to create awareness about energy conservation and global warming? Nothing much you would say apart from hosting some anti global warming slogans and carrying interviews of experts on green revolution. Well, in that case here is a surprise for you. Google, the most used search engine on the internet, is going all black to keep the mother earth green! It has launched an all-black version of its search engine at www.blackle.com. Blackle stands for Black Google. It is the same old search engine familiar to the netizens around the world but with a black background. Google made this change as a response to a blog-posting titled ‘Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year’.

This appears to be the first instance when a popular website has taken steps towards energy conservation, which has largely been a forte of global energy utilities. Earlier in January, Mark Ontkush, owner of the blog ecoIron (http://ecoiron.blogspot.com), had expressed a wish for black Google to save energy per computer per view. Mark who identifies himself as a 39 year old green computing evangelist from Boston, USA had then argued that an all white web page – the one like Google has -- needs about 74 watts of power for display, 25% more than what an all black page uses. Google gets over 200 million queries every day. This translates into 5,50,000 hours of daily display assuming an average display time of 10 seconds. Since an all black web page needs 15 watts less, this would result into savings of 3000 megawatt-hours annually. Mark had further quantified this savings to be over $ 75,000 annually at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour in case of cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors.

“We believe that there is a value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy”, a note on Google’s website said. It also encourages users to set Blackle as a home page for the browser. “Remember, every bit counts!” it says.

The thought posted by Mark on his blog soon became popular in the Silicon Valley. While some supported the thought, others were sceptical about the authenticity of the calculations. It was argued that screens based on liquid crystal display (LCD) technology consumed the same power or in some cases more while displaying an all black screen. Since more than 75% of the screens in the world are LCDs, an all black display would hardly save energy. In a reply posted on his website, Mark says,” My point is that there is a colour that, after taking into account, all types of monitors (LCD, Plasma, organic LEDs) is the most efficient for large sites”.

It needs to be seen whether this trend also catches up with other popular search engines and websites including msn, Yahoo, ask and altavista, which mainly use a white display.

Labels: Corporations

posted by Ranjit @ 6/18/2007 07:37:00 pm