‘Going green’ has become a very common expression nowadays – but who would have thought that ‘going black’ would actually be a part of that?
The way to go green today is to take very small steps that may seem insignificant, but that have great impact in the long run, especially if they become common practices. Every little way to perform our daily routines using just a little bit less energy can apparently make the world of difference. So if the colour black, or the concept of black as darkness have generally been associated to a negative symbology, when it comes to technology and energy-saving, allegedly going ‘obscure’ is the thing to do!
Or, at least, this is the theory behind Blackle, a new search engine that claims we can help the planet just by switching to a black screen, instead of sticking to the Google bright white homepage that we are all used to.

From the Blackle homepage:
Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.
Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002
In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.
We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

Of course this sounds like really good news! Only, quite a few articles and blog posts have been published in response, that claim the research behind Blackle’s idea is not accurate, and the energy savings are not as huge as we would like to believe. This response doesn’t only come from Google itself (that has obvious reasons to refute a theory that might cause a loss in the number of users), but also from a number of indipendent sources that do admit that switching to a black screen doesn’t necessairly mean a lower energy consumption.
Who to believe then? Well, to know more, quite a lot can be found at technorati.com. Then, if one decides to give the black screen a try, apparently they will be spoilt for choice: as well as Blackle, blackgoogle.co.uk and darkoogle.com display the same black homepage.
Hard-core environmentalism, or do we now want even our monitors to wear a oh-so-now Little Black Dress?