Simple ideas are often the best and I love this one :). A few weeks back I published an article on monitor colors and electricity consumption – for example, white displayed on a computer monitor uses 25% more electricity than when black is displayed*. It may not sound like a great deal, but when you consider the millions of computers in use globally, that amounts to a huge amount of electricity.

When you think of search engines, probably the first that comes to mind is Google. The home page is mostly white, as are the search results pages. With half a billion people visiting Google monthly, that’s an awful lot of white and extra wattage!

Enter Blackle.com – a search engine powered by Google data; but with results displaying in light grey/silver on a black background. So you get the same Google quality results, without the same amount of electricity consumption.

Sure, it may only amount to a few watts a year saving for you, but imagine if millions of people  used this – as the old saying goes, “look after the watts and the gigawatts will look after themselves” :).

According to the counter on Blackle at the time of my visit, 4,587.979 Watt hours have been saved. I hope the Blackle team release a Blackle toolbar soon too!

* added note: as it turns out, this only applies to CRT monitors, not LCD