Have you heard about Blackle? I hadn’t, a friend told me about it yesterday. It’s a black, energy-saving version of Google. Apparently, a black screen uses less energy than a white, and every time you use Blackle instead of Google, you help the environment. At least, that’s the theory:

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.

I just made Blackle my default search engine (if you use that nifty google bar in Firefox, here’s where you can add Blackle).