"Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time".
"Blackle.com??" i hear you mumble. It's a new search engine powered by Google, it has a black screen as opposed to the white one as seen on Google. The theory behind it is that a black screen uses much less energy than a white screen, thus if the millions of people who use search engines everyday used one with a black screen (as opposed to a white one) then collectively we would all be using less energy and therefore through some long winded process be saving the planet by reducing the effect of global warming (i'm not being pessimistic or indeed skeptic of the whole idea i simply just don't know all the nitty gritty details......)
I really applaud the people who came up with the whole idea (a company called Heap media..), I mean considering how popular search engines are you could really make a difference in the amount of energy used. However one thing really confuses me...Instead of developing a whole new search engine that has a black background in order to save energy why not simply change the background colour of Google, or Ask Jeeves, or even Yahoo for that matter...?
Just think about all the trillions of people who use Google on a daily basis, not all of them are going to know about Blackle and maybe all of them never will. But if you just changed the background colour of Google they wouldn't have to find out about Blackle, do the same with Ask Jeeves and Yahoo and any other search engines and before you know it your saving loads energy without having to do much at all...
(i'm not criticising Blackle i really do think it's a good idea, i just think it could have been executed better...*sigh*)
4 comments:
To quote South Park, "Ask Jeeves? Nobody uses Ask Jeeves! Just Google it!"
I know why Google doesn't use a black background...because it looks rubbish. Sad but true. Have you tried a search on blackle? It looks rubbish :(
yeh it does look rubbish, i tried it for a few days, its quite downheartining, the black screen just makes your mood drop, the only thing which keeps it up is the feeling that your doing something good (however small)
If only they had you on their management team *big sigh*
The Carbon Neutral Search Engine also offers black background search using Google Custom Search but offsets a minimum of 100g of CO2 per search. It might make you feel even better than doing it just to save energy.
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