Blackle - the energy saving search engine

Blackle is like Google, but the screen's all black instead of white. That's pretty much it, really. Why should we care? Because it takes less energy to display a black screen on your monitor than it does to display a white screen. Hey, it's all about saving the planet, baby.

From their About page: "In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages. We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy."

I ran a test search on Blackle using the term "praying mantis" and the results were not identical to those retrieved by Google, but pretty darn close. The top 4 or 5 hits were really the same, just in a different order; after that, it varied only a little. On the whole, though, looks like an eco-friendly option for those casual searches. An added benefit: If you use your computer in the dark a lot (say, at night with the lights off), it spares you from the horrid, eye-raping brightness of a white homepage...

thanks to: LibrarianInBlack