I prefer using Darkoogle http://www.darkoogle.com another black Google and is available in over 40 countries http://www.darkoogle.com/international

Best of all its got the ‘similar page’ option in the result page like the normal white Google. I use that a lot.

It actually uses (slightly) more power on liquid crystal displays.

Well, it’s already been posted but Z is right, it uses more power on LCDs, which make up pretty much all laptop screens and most flat-panel desktop displays because they work by shining a uniform backlight through an array of pixels with liquid crystals that selectively absorb some of the light and the darker the pixel, the higher the voltage being used on that particular pixel, so there is actually a slight increase.

If you want to save energy on an LCD, lower the brightness.

Now, if you are using a CRT monitor, this does save energy, but CRTs are making up a smaller and smaller portion of the actual user-base.

how much energy does it save on a CRT anyway? I was under the impression that the electron beam was created by a thermal process and always on…

my big complaint is that blackle doesnt have an image search. it was when i immediately noticed the lack of this feature that i realized how much i search thru images!

Even better are the handful of sites that present google with ads, and then donate all of the advertising revenue to a charity.

Search Kindly even let’s you vote on which charity to donate to each month!

It’s a little bit gawdy and ad covered but that’s the whole point, and it doesn’t work any differently than google.

http://www.searchkindly.org/index.php

Save energy – set your monitor to turn off after 5 minutes (or whatever you find acceptable based on your work habits).

It drives me nuts that so many people keep their LCDs always on and use a screen savers. Some people have interrupted working habits where they need to often and quickly access their computer, but for the rest of us: have your monitor turn off! Those 5 seconds waiting for the warmup aren’t a big.

Also, turn off your work computer at night and over the weekends.

Repeatedly debunked, including by Google themselves:

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

The biggest technology to focus on in order to save energy are automobiles. A monitor is a 100 watt device (approx) and a car is a ~100 hp device at 770 watts/hp as I recall the conversion. Drive less and drive a fuel efficient car. That will do more than any energy saving idea with electronics.

Lawrence B. Crowell

” but for the rest of us: have your monitor turn off! Those 5 seconds waiting for the warmup aren’t a big.”

And if your laptop has an LED backlight, there is no warmup.

What bugs me are offices that leave the overhead lights on.

And Julianne, I hope you’ve learned your lesson. No good intention goes unridiculed.

Sean — I agree with you that the far larger problems are structural. However, I am also someone who reuses aluminum foil and plastic bags, so small solutions obviously serve some role in staunching wounds in my psyche.

Less facetiously, however, I do think that small solutions frequently add up to something substantial. I’ve been spending a significant fraction of my past few summers in Germany, where I was presented with 4 separate recepticles for sorting my trash. I was initially so flummoxed that I left most of my trash on the countertop in fear of doing it wrong. However, after mastering the system, the fraction of my waste that was true, destined-for-the-landfill, capital-T trash was minute, even for a family of 4. If you have a nation of people doing this, you have to have a significant reduction in the amount of stuff going to the landfill. The government clearly plays a role in organizing this effort and making it sustainable, but individual action is critical for success.

However, I completely understand (and understood at posting) that Blackle is not exactly equivalent. I may reuse my tin-foil, but I’m not quite that naive!

Odd, just yesterday I was thinking about two things that this site has that aren’t energy specific – one was that I am sometimes interested in minimizing ambient light for dark-adaptation reasons (not astronomical or flight-deck grade serious-level) – and the other was that I was wondering why Google didn’t enlarge the width of their search form – I find myself sometimes searching with somewhat lengthy terms and hate having to scroll around in the slot.

Thanks for bringing this (and via the comments) another darkened google to my attention. I’ve been using Scroogle for some time because I like the thumb-your-nose at tracking attitude.

Just to play devils advocate there is (in principle) a cross over with recycling where you are spending more energy to reprocess the materials than you would have had to start from scratch.

I was thinking of plastics and the like more than metal.

I totally agree that recycling is a good thing, I am just throwing out there that it is possible to go too far, similar to bio-fuels. Yes, running on corn sounds like a good idea, but depending on who’s numbers you believe, it ends up energy (read fossil fuel) negative.

I agree with both Sean and Julianne that you can’t save the world one recycled newspaper or compact fluorescent at a time. However, I also agree that making an effort to do things like cut down on garbage, packaging, energy use etc can show a definite improvement per person. The importance of this, I think, is not just “what if everybody did it” but getting people involved. When people think that conservation is something that they can participate in, I think it makes them more open to supporting large-scale conservation and environmental defense actions, such as carbon pricing. People have a way of tuninng out problems that sound so much bigger than their lives as to have no immediate impact.

Back to Google searching, we might estimate the carbon load of one’s Google search. It is often estimated that Goog operates about 5e5 servers, with power consumption perhaps 20-100 MW and an electric bill of maybe US$20-100 million/yr. I have no idea how many Google searches people do per day – a billion? If so, your search costs them about 1 watt-hour. (Ignoring whatever tiny fraction of their power is devoted to blogspot, etc.) If you spend 10 minutes doing the search and looking at the results on a 60 watt laptop, you used 10 watt-hours. IOW, your computer is a bigger problem, in carbon load, than Goog’s datacenter – because there are so many other computers like it. Thus, while the original premise is of course a joke, the whole idea that we could use vastly more efficient computers is not a bad one. (One that Google is working on, because the way CPUs are developing, their electric bill may soon be larger than the capital cost of their servers.)