Paint it black

In Sociology today, somebody mentioned something interesting: There are alternative, “green” search engines that apparently save energy just by the colours set in the stylesheet of the page (the background colour was specifically mentioned, but I imagine that this goes for input boxes, text areas, and font colours, too.) Instead of using a white background with white input boxes, there are two Google-like search engine alternatives that use black backgrounds and black input boxes in the effort to cut down on the wattage used to display the page and therefore save energy.

Curious, I looked up “black google alternative” (on Google, out of all places.) I found this site, which claimed that “an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts” and referenced to the website Blackle.com. Truthfully, I like this unintentionally-gothy-yet-green Google alternative, which essentially uses the Google search engine but with a different page style, advertisements, and logos. Blackle, like Google, is also available in other languages.

I always found darker page colours to be easier on the eyes, but now I feel really good about myself: I was probably saving tons of energy in the years that I have been mainly using black and other dark background colours on my website layouts!