Google.com Vs Blackle.com... Is it really worth?

Since there was a discussion about blackle.com in one of the comment, just thought could put this as a seperate post.

It has been very evident that people insist on using BLACKLE.COM as an alternative to GOOGLE.COM on the basis of power saving. And in fact the site "BLACKLE.COM" itself speaks about huge power savings that could be achieved this way...... Now the question is how far is this true?

As everyone of you know, the GOOGLE site has a white background by virtue of which it consumes the maximum power when compared to other colours. (RGB in ratio 1:1:1)

So lets get into the actuals which speak of how worthy is blackle.com in comparison with google.com.

If u r using a CRT monitor, then ofcourse using blackle.com can save a lot of power. Why? As expained above, the RGB ratio of white color. CRT uses the generic RGB principle to lit the screen by different colors owing to which the power consumption is high for white and low for black.

But just in case if u r using a flat/ LCD monitor, think again.. because LCD monitor ends up using more power in case of blackle.com when compared to normal google.com. Why is this? Its just because the way LCD's work. In LCD's, continous light is lit behind which passes through the subpixels and based on polarization and with a proportionate charge, it is displayed as a respective color pixel. When no electricity is passed through the polarized filters, all the backlight will be allowed by the subpixel to pass through to the front screeen,which means white light takes no additional electricity to be displayed on the screen. But when black pixel needs to be shown, additional electricity will be used to block the light which means more power consumption.

And just for statistics, blackle.com ends up using 3-5 WHr more power than google.com in case of LCD / Flat monitors.

But one more fact to be considered here is that almost all search engine users in the world usually keep there search engine screen open for only about 2 secs on an average after which they navigate to the respective site according to search results. This is just for ur information, which means power saving is minimal on per-user basis but definitely a large quantity when collectively visualized.

So, in short, if u r using CRT monitors, use blackle.com as ur home page and if u r using a LCD monitor/ flat monitors/ laptops, use normal google page as ur home page :-)

Happy Power Saving!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!