Max Gladwell

Adding value and making a difference with your Internet search queries. Part I looks at the black-background myth.

There is a substantial trend among social entrepreneurs and web startups: harnessing our usage of the web and its many tools for good. In other words, making the everyday things we do across the web count toward a purpose beyond that of the acts themselves. To make it all matter in some way.

It’s a simple concept that pre-dates the web: buy our stuff, and we’ll donate a percentage to charity. That’s the basics of it, but the web opens this up to a tremendous scale in lieu of the hundreds of millions of people who do these things every day, and the hundreds of billions in revenue generated every year from them. They include online shopping, social networking, instant messaging, reviewing and rating products, and reading content. The king of all online activity, though, is search.

It’s possible to think that some portion of our Google search activity goes to good causes, since the search giant sets aside significant sums for its philanthropic arm: “Google.org aspires to use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age: climate change, poverty and emerging disease.” For many, though, this isn’t enough. Further, Google’s search results are generic. So we’ll look at a host of alternatives that can give you more relevant results while potentially making a difference.

These purpose-driven search models fall into three basic categories: a custom search that returns “greener” results; a donation model that contributes advertising and sponsorship revenue to good causes; and the black background Google model that conserves energy. We’ll look at each in this three-part series. We begin with the dark-screen theory.

In January of 2007, blogger Mark Ontkush of EcoIron.blogspot.com hypothesized that black screens require less energy than white screens by about 15 watts per view. Therefore, if Google went black, it would save a significant amount of energy due to the scale of its 200 million daily search queries. It set off a spritied debate on the topic, together with so many versions of a dark-screened Google. These started with Australia-based Blackle, which appears to get significant traffic according to Alexa (#2,937), and the bandwagon now overflows with copycats. Here are a handful of them, most of which spin the same story:

“We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.” Other than a black background, it is simply a generic Google search.”

“Ranzooz, world’s first AGES Search Engine (Anti Glare, Energy Saving) was created in this internet world to save our eyes and energy, without feeling exhausted in our busy net-savvy schedule. Nowadays search engines are used so frequently that there was much need of a search engine that would provide us with color combination that even massive usage won’t leave strain on the eyes of the user. So we have Ranzooz designed with only those color combinations that leave a soothing effect on your eyes, and you wont feel strained even after prolonged usage. The majors of the screen being black, it also saves energy of your monitor, thus increasing your monitor’s life-span manifold.”

Ranzooz also uses Google search but adds a supposed health benefit to your search results by “reducing eye strain”. The “eye strain effect bar” reduces the “glare” or contrast. This issue of strained viewing has been a common criticism of the dark backgrounds found with Blackle and others like it. Ranzooz also finds symbolic value in the colors of green and blue as life and calming respectively.

If you can believe it, there are no fewer than five others, none of which offers anything more than a slightly different color pallet.

“It is very simple and easy to be greener. Think, there are so many computers in the word – together we can make a big difference. If you can’t, you don’t have to follow all 10 ways (to get into the GreenGLE mood – we believe that just following one can make a difference. It all ads up.” With Greenergle, you get the added value of a top-10 list…where using Greenergle is #1, of course.

No “About Us” section for Blaxel, but it also offers search for a specific list of News and Tech sites.

“Power Google displays the search results in black background, rather than the traditional white background used on the Google site. This allows your workscreen monitor to save power while viewing the webpage. Considering the number of people who use Google to search the web, imagine how much power can be saved each day.” Curiously, it’s built on the Blogspot platform.

“It’s a fact that computer monitors displaying predominantly white backgrounds consume more energy than those that display simple screens with a black background. A typical white screen uses around 74 watts of electricity – a black version of the same screen uses around 59 watts (so saving around 15 watts per hour). A saving of 15 watts isn’t huge on it’s own (you couldn’t even run a household lightbulb with it). However, Google gets around 200 million hits a day. Muliply [sic] our modest 15 watt saving by 200 million and things start to get interesting.”

“Earthle was created with the idea in mind that if we as humans ALL join together and make the smallest of changes in our daily lives we can have massive impacts on saving Mother Earth. If humans around the world were to start using Earthle it would save an estimated 750 Megawatt-hours a year. When you search using Earthle, the results are powered by google.com so the search results provided by Earthle are the same as what you would get using google.com (the best search engine in the world).”

Does a black background make any difference whatsoever? Intuitively, we never thought so. It just didn’t make sense. The Wall Street Journal picked up on the hoopla generated from Ontkucsh’s post and the subsequent launch of Blackle.

In response to a page from my colleagues at WSJ.com’s Energy Roundup blog, I looked into the numbers. The federal Energy Star program, which encourages consumers to cut their energy consumption, had someone do a quick test for me and found that modern LCD computer monitors don’t see much benefit from a black screen.

On LCD displays, color may confer no benefit at all. In response to my inquiry, Steve Ryan, program manager for Energy Star’s power-management program, asked consulting firm Cadmus Group to run a quick test by loading Blackle, Google and the Web site of the New York Times (which is, like Google, mostly white on-screen) on two monitors — one CRT, one LCD — and connecting a power meter to both. “We found that the color on screen mattered very little to the energy color consumption of the LCD monitor,” said David Korn, principal at Cadmus, which specializes in energy and environment, and does work for the government. The changes were so slight as to be within the margin of error for the power meter. Tweaking brightness and contrast and settings had a bigger effect. The bulkier CRT screen did see savings with Blackle of between 5% and 20%.

As many critics noted, including those in the comments section of the WSJ article, results on these black backgrounds are much more difficult to read. Therefore, even if you have a CRT monitor you’ll likely to spend more time sifting through the results and negate any savings that may have been created. That must have been the inspiration behind Ranzooz.

Unfortunately, these search sites are tackling problems that don’t exist. One way to address the supposed issue is to never go to Google’s homepage. Simply use a search bar in Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Internet Explorer. Further, since these sites are all part of the Google Co-op program, they simply exist to earn fees from your Google searches. In our estimation, it’s better to give the whole fee to Google in the knowledge that some of it will end up funding a Google.org initiative…not to mention the many for-profit services that Google develops and or acquires and makes available for free, such as YouTube.

In the next post, we’ll explore some much more worthwhile “green search” sites and services. We just felt it necessary to dispell with the black-screen myth right off the bat.

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