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Ecologically Sustainable Search

Posted: Tue 06/26/2007 by ramiro

Sometime ago I read that it would save quite a lot of energy if Google was using black as the background color of it's search page instead of white. Today I stumbled upon blackgoogle.com. I was looking for an alternative to Google anyway, so I may start with this one.

As an ecologically conscious person I somehow have a better feeling though still using Google. Here are some numbers I found on the ecoIron Blog that legitimate using Black Google as long as there is no better search engine:

  • An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, an all black page 59 watts.
  • Google gets about 200 million queries a day. Assuming each query is displayed for 10 seconds, Google is running 550,000 hours every day. If Google would use a black background this would turn into savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year.
Submitted by Djun Kim (not verified) on Tue, 08/21/2007 - 20:56.
The energy use computation is based on using CRTs; for LCD's, the overall consumption would be lower, and essentially independent of the colour displayed. 'Blackgoogle' is, I would say, a red herring these days. On the topic of energy conservation: upgrading to an LCD would be a great thing to do from an energy point of view. Making sure that your computers, and peripherals, especially laser printers, are off when not in active use (not on 'standby'), also will save a considerable amount of energy. The same applies to almost all consumer electronics which plug into AC - televisions, stereos, etc.
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