Paint the Google all black

Last month I argued that a power point with a black background uses much less electricity than a power point with a white background. (Paint The Power Point Black)

Even if you don't make many projected power point presentations, you do use search engines. I'm willing to bet that your search engine is designed with a white background. Unless you are on an LCD screen, you are using way too much juice with one of the portals. What to do?

Paint the Google all black. I have finally found the article that claims that if Google redesigned their website with a black background, it would save an enormous amount of energy. (Black Google Would Save 750-Megawatt Hours Per Year). This is especially true for CRT, OLED and Plasma devices. Many people would complain that this would be harder to read, but we could adjust. If you've seen Tom Peters do a talk, you've easily kept up with his 100 or so slides, few have a high-usage white background. Visit his site to download one of his power points.

I've found a great solution for now. Check out a black version of Google called Ninja. You can also try Blackle.com. Same results, less energy use. Try it out, it works. Make it your home page and try it for a few days.

Read: Excellent blog post on the energy economics of a Black Google (AskPablo Post)

Comments

[Brad Goode]

Hey Tim,

I remembered reading your post about this a few weeks ago when I saw this post on the official Google blog today about how their findings and other are oppisite of ninja.com's. They do offer some good advice on how to save energy in other ways. Its worth checking out.

peace

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.html

[Leon]

That's an amazing observation and great idea- though I have to disagree, Tim. I'm all for saving energy... but white text on black is a nightmare on the eyes!

Read any site with this combination, get up from your desk and walk down the hall. You'll think you're on a bad psychedelic trip! :P

-Leon

[Tim Sanders]

Hello Nick --

Check out my humble redesign to take my blog towards black/grey.

Tim

[Nick Knutzen]

I'm not sure about the power savings, but try pressing ALT+SHIFT+PrintScrn in Windows XP. It turned my computer backgrounds to all black.

[Larry Sherrell]

Tim,

Does this mean your blog template with will reflect this idea in the near future? :)

[Loralea]

Having just read the Google story, I found this article interesting. They've done so much right, I'm surprised that they haven't managed to get the message out to use Black Google. Anything to save power, and the environment, I'm switching to ninja right now.

[David Berkowitz]

Tim, you have some great points here, though I'll quibble with one. While I'm a big fan of Tom Peters' work, his slides are unreadable. And yes, I even had the correct fonts installed.

[Trevor]

Tim,

Most of the comments on that article rightly argue that on LCDs (which are fast becoming the majority)whether a pixel is black or white doesn't affect power consumption. I even seen some arguments that it takes less power to show white on LCDs (essentially letting the backlight show completely) versus black (which requires obscuring the backlight).

Food for thought

[Liene]

Blackle.com is the same concept as well.