Saving the planet | Whitespace blog
Black is the new green
Mark Ontkush, owner of the ecoIron blog, suggested some time ago that a large amount of energy could be saved if Google switched their home page from white to black. We agreed.
He put initial estimates at 750 Megawatt-hours a year. It sounds bizarre but in fact different colours consume different amounts of energy on computer monitors and, depending on the technology (LCD, CRT etc), these energy levels vary. If Google switched to black with its 200 million queries a day, imagine the difference it would make. Here are two sites powered by the Google search with black backgrounds if you want to make the switch:
http://www.darkoogle.com/
http://www.earthle.com/
In July 2007, the Financial Times reported that, according to the Nielsen/NetRatings for May, users spent 2,557,000,000 minutes on Google websites; this translates into 511,400,000 hours of Google website use per year. The monthly figures for Yahoo (746M) , MySpace (7,535M), and YouTube (2,117M) are comparable. Just imagine the energy saving impact of black backgrounds on all these sites combined.
'Every little helps' as they say and we hope our own black backgrounds go some way towards raising awareness, if not towards saving the planet.
We would be interested to hear your opinions on this. If you think your company should switch to using Google on a black background let us know and we'll forward the collective opinion on.
Phil Barnes, Interactive Director, Whitespace
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