Blackle

Hello everyone!

Lately I have been keeping the time spent on my computer to a minimum, so I haven’t posted anything for months. However, today I thought that I should log on to give readers a quick update about the environment.

Google. When I say this, what comes to your mind? I’m sure you all imagine this search engine- the image of its bright, colourful heading on a clean, white page. Google is probably the most famous search engine I know, and it was the first search engine I ever used. Well did you know that Google has been re-created so that there is a search engine? You’re probably wondering what the point is in doing this. Like I mean, one search engine’s enough. All search engines do the same thing- type in what you’re looking for and click search. About a week ago I was informed this new search engine, and gee was I impressed! Why? Because this one was especially made to save energy and help the environment!

The name’s Blackle. Unlike ‘Google’, it’s heading is dark, and instead of having a bright white background, the background of Blackle is black, of course! All right, even I admit that I preferred the nice, colourful theme of Google. However, Blackle serves a much more important purpose than looks. As I’m sure many of you know, the environment is in a lot of strife, so we should all try and do a bit to help. Blackle is the perfect way to do this when we have to look something up on the internet. As Heap Media (the creator of Blackle) explains, taking small steps in our everyday lives to save energy is important. You may think that this isn’t going to make much of a difference, but if everyone took these small steps, there would definitely be a huge difference! Blackle is an example of taking small steps. It’s as easy to use as Google and has the same results. The only thing that I have noticed that it’s missing is the image search option. Sometimes I use this option, so whenever I need to use it I go onto the normal Google website, but for the rest of the time, I do all my searches on Blackle.

So what is the concept of having a black screen? How does it help the environment? Apparently, black screens don’t use as much power as white screens. I’m guessing that this is because they are much darker. So therefore, every time someone uses Blackle instead of Google, they are saving energy. As I write this, it says that 136,525.445 Watt hours have been saved. Of course, this number will continue to go up. This just proves that by simply changing your search engine to Blackle, you, among with everyone else that has been using Blackle, are making a real difference.

I’d also like to add to this post a bit of info about the origin of this fantastic idea. The idea of having a black screen to save energy was actually discovered by a man called Mark. He posted his discovery on his blog in January 2007, which attracted quite a bit of interest. If you’re interested, you can check out the very blog post that started this by clicking here.

Heap Media created Blackle because believe that there is great value in the concept. They say that even if the energy savings are small, they all add up.

As I end my blog post, I encourage you to visit Blackle (www.blackle.com) to see this site for yourself. I also encourage you to use Blackle as your search engine from now on because it’s not a hard way to help contribute towards helping the environment. If you were a frequent user of Google, it may take some time to get used to typing in “Blackle” instead of “Google” (trust me, I know from experience), but eventually you will get into a habit of automatically using Blackle instead. You may even like to set it as your home page as well.

Thankyou to everyone who takes the time to read my blog. I hope I have taught you a fact or two by writing this post. Have a great day!

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