Blackle

A friend put me onto this yesterday - it's an energy-saving search engine with a black screen. It uses Google to search but doesn't quite come up with the same results. Reasonably accurate, though.

It also tells you how many watt hours are being saved using the site...

Blackle wrote:381,306.047 Watt hours saved

http://www.blackle.com

EDIT: It also has a free site promo tool to get your own site up and running.

http://www.blacklepages.com/get-listed/

EDIT #2: Found this from the Wikipedia article on Blackle...

Those lovely folks at Wikipedia wrote:The principle behind Blackle is based on the fact that the display of different colours consumes different amounts of energy on computer monitors.^[3]
The creators of Blackle cite a 2002 study from Roberson, who tested a
variety of CRT and LCD monitors and found that an all black screen
consumed less energy than an all white screen on all of them.^[3]
The creators of Blackle state that the idea behind the site came from a blog, which estimated that a black Google would save 750 megawatt-hours a year^[1]. On the Blackle homepage,
the creators of Blackle provide a count of the number of watt-hours
that they claim the users of Blackle have collectively saved.

Tests have apparently been carried out on LCD and CRT monitors to see if it actually works. Some CRTs and larger (24-inch plus) monitors show a marked saving - not as much as the site claims, but at least it would be a start.

So all this begs a question: should we all have black backgrounds?

EDIT#3: Eep. A bit more research dragged this up:

http://blogs.sun.com/lskrocki/entry/you_know_how_blackle_is

What to think?

Apparently it uses more energy if you use smaller LCD monitors.

Meh, if you have a CRT and you want to give it a try, go for it.

Maybe I should have put this in Soapbox.

*Bumpitty-bumpitty-bump-bump-BUMP*

Google have now got in on the act with this:



And I quote:

Google wrote:
Google users in the United Kingdom will notice today that we "turned the lights out" on the Google.co.uk homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don't do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

when i first saw that yesterday i paniced and ran a virus scan, i should have read the small print first

cinder144uk wrote:when i first saw that yesterday i paniced and ran a virus scan, i should have read the small print first

I thought I'd opened Blackle by mistake. Poor old Blackle's getting a bit of a bad press actually. It's not that bad as search engines go.

i didnt seem to have trouble with it, still able to find everything i serched for.
its google trying to bad press the compertition i thinks

cinder144uk wrote:i didnt seem to have trouble with it, still able to find everything i serched for.
its google trying to bad press the compertition i thinks

And the last thing Google needs to worry about is competition from Blackle, especially as it uses Google to power its main search engine.