A cathode ray, the thing that lights up your screen, uses 74 watts to light up a white screen. However, it only uses 59 to light up a black one. So it’s not every day when an obsessive will to keep Star Trek alive through strange search engines leads to accidental environmental benefit. And it’s not everyday that I can write a sentence like that. But today I can, because Klingonsearch, through its black background, actually saves energy—especially useful if you’re low on battery and in a pinch to do a few searches without an outlet nearby. But what does it actually do? Meaning, where’s the Klingon? From what I could muster, I tried several different searches, and most of the time, my top links included the words “star” or “trek” in them. So, for example, do a search for “desk” and you will get this:

Leave it up to a whacked-out Trekkie to program something like this. Regular searches with many words work just as well as any major search engine. And luckily, his accidental energy-saving display got his site to be displayed here.

Similarly, we have Znout, a little more professional in its presentation, and intentionally an energy-saver. Thanks to the black background at Znout (as well as Klingonsearch) you can save up to 30% energy while searching the web. This might not be much if you consider just a single search query, but it adds up: If all searches would be made with a black background, 750 megawatt hours could be saved every year.  According to Znout, the IT industry consumes more energy than the whole aircraft industry. They’re probably right, considering I use the internet way more than I fly a plane. That’s why Znout uses servers that need 55% less energy and are operating with solar energy to make your searches more ecological. Znout also has a plugin you can download to put on your toolbar.

Want another one? Here’s Earthle, saving energy one search at a time. Earthle has a bit of a different calculation when it comes to energy savings. They quote a guy named Mark Onthkush who said the following in January 2007:

“Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.”

Yet another: Blackle. I have to say people – you all have the same good idea. But with the exception of Klingonsearch, which has its own thing going here with “star” and “trek” and whatnot, shouldn’t you all unite for the cause and get the word out? We’re helping out as much as we can here, so let’s pool resources.

Whoops! Forgot about this one:

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Alts, Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.