Big Little Things

Energy-saving search

I’ve just begun using Blackle, a Google search engine with the colors removed, and white type on a black background. And since your computer uses more power to create colors on your screen, or even to create the white background of your traditional Google search screen. What’s smart about this is that very little behavior change on the part of the user is necessary, and people still get the satisfaction of feeling like they’re at least doing something to help. You could call this armchair activism if you want to, but I think that everyone doing small achievable things has more power than a few people endlessly pushing giant activist initiatives up a hill.

06/09/08 by josh kamler

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Inventions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Energy-saving search”

  1. Mitchell Says:
    June 10th, 2008 at 10:24 am

    I’m with you on this one. Another neat thing you can do if you use an Apple computer is to hit command+option+ctrl+8 and inverse your display. In most programs/websites that should amount to energy savings. If you like the idea but find that a simple inverting leaves you wanting there is a utility program called Nocturne that will give you some better control of darking up that display while retaining usability. http://www.blacktree.com/projects/nocturne.html

  2. Jeff Caldwell Says:
    June 11th, 2008 at 11:01 am

    So I went to “Blackle” like you told me….

    The window that opened was maybe 1/3 the size of my entire screen, so everything in the background was still in full color and brightly illuminated. I searched for “Save the world without leaving home” which took 5 seconds, Scrolled through the results, that took 10 seconds, and went to the site I found “http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/virtual_volunteering.html”.

    I maybe spent 15 full seconds at Blackele which was hard to read and I’m not even sure if it works as good as Google. I don’t know who Heap Media is and this comes off as self serving. Though there is a cute little counter at the bottom counting down the watts saved which may or may not be accurate. All with a painfully bad pillow embossed logo!

    Wouldn’t we save more energy if we just collectively turned off some lights and stopped wasting time on the internet searching for ways to save the world?

  3. josh kamler Says:
    June 11th, 2008 at 11:09 am

    @jeff
    Absolutely. Can you please convince everyone to collectively turn off their lights and stop surfing the internet?

  4. Jeff Caldwell Says:
    June 11th, 2008 at 11:53 am

    Image how much energy would be saved if internet porn was banned!

  5. Amanda Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 6:51 am

    I’m already using Blaxel.com another black google to save energy. The text is much easier to see

    Don’t like the blackle text color… too dark…

  6. Rich Says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 12:37 pm

    You’re not saving any energy unless you’re still using a CRT. LCD displays use more energy to display black (hold a crystal rotated) than white (let the backlight shine through).

    And that’s not Google’s; it’s some third party using Google’s custom search product, and collecting AdSense revenue whenever someone clicks a paid search result.

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