It’s like Google, but black

I’m a bit behind the times with this one (treehugger beat me to it), but I’ve just discovered Blackle - a search engine page. It looks like Google gone goth - it’s all in shades of black and grey. But it still looks like Google and searches like Google. So why turn Google dark? Well, to save energy of course.

The idea for the site came out of an article called ‘Would a black Google save energy’, where the authors argue that white pages use more energy to load than black pages do . The difference for each individual user is minimal, but multiply that difference between the vast army of googlers round the world and the difference becomes significant.

Despite its name and the fact that it uses Google’s searching paradigm to find pages, Blackle is apparently nothing to do with Google, but was developed in Australia. From a cursory glance, it doesn’t seem to be exactly the same. Even though it turns up the same results in a search for inklingmagazine blog, Google found over 333,000 pages whereas Blackle has only identified 23,200. But condsidering I rarely click beyond the front few pages of Google searches anyway it probably doesn’t matter all that much. Slightly disappointingly, if I personally start using Blackle I’ll be making an even smaller contribution, as I already have an LCD display. These types of monitor already use less energy (explanation of that here). If I really want my computer to use less energy, I need to set my screensaver to blank screen and turn off the monitor when I’m not using it. But if by using Blackle as my homepage I’m being reminded to pursue these energy saving measures then the site is doing A Good Thing. Plus it makes a nice change, so why not.