Is The Future Of The Web BLACK?
Back in 2007 , a blogger had blogged that a black google would save 3000 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.
The actual mathematics comes around like if you take at look at Google, which gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s really assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on a desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background (on a CRT monitor! ) could 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.
That’s about the same energy the whole of Mumbai uses daily. Just imagine if all the popular sites Google, msn, yahoo, facebook could think of a black homepage with their UI team, this not only would mean energy saving but a proper revenue model also. I’ll tell you how -
After the Kyoto Protocol, which entered into effect after 16 february, 2005, companies would have to reduce their carbon emissions or they will have to buy them from other companies who emit less. Since google and yahoo emit carbon through servers; black screens would enable them to cut down on their carbon emmissions and thus trade carbon for a lot of dollars. I am not exactly sure how much emmissions are there from their servers but definitely you could expect them to be very high since they crawl the whole World Wide Web.
We had earlier blogged about google investing in renewable energy ; so i am sure those those energy fanatics would really think of this model may be in the near future when the relevance of carbon credits will be much more. And if one of them does, the others might follow suit . So the future of the web seems pretty BLACK !
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Dude – do you have proof for anything you write? Your Kyoto Protocol link goes to a blank web-site.
Dude,
sorry , actually there was some error with the link which has been repaired. As per the proof, since i m not associated with any carbon credit agency , i cant really say how much will revenues will these cos. make ! Anyways thanks for the correction
I am not at liberty to give details on the revenue potential but it is excellent, and carbon credits can be traded eventually like stocks , between various companies. The Koyoto protocol yielded some good things.
Old story but a nice writeup!
Most of the people who use the internet for any significant amount of time are using LCDs (or would be switching to LCD soon or later) so I don’t see how this will help.
In fact in India the power savings by a black page vs a white one in negligible compared to the loses via theft, bad distribution, faulty wiring etc.
Check this out.
Seems that the reverse is actually true!!