Search site cashes in on eco-guilt

Taken from smh.com.au
By Asher Moses
August 1, 2007


The Sydney-based makers of a so-called eco-friendly version of Google claim they're helping to rescue the planet, but all that's really been saved is the piles of money they're banking in the process.

Hundreds of thousands of searches a day are conducted by Blackle.com users, who use the search engine instead of Google because they believe they're doing their bit for the environment.

Its creator, Toby Heap, said Blackle.com - a custom version of Google with a black rather than a white background - could save thousands of watts of power a year because it took less juice for a monitor to display black than white.

But that claim is now being disputed by those who have tested the theory and say the power saving benefits are negligible or non-existent.

Far from an altruistic venture, the site, like Google itself, makes money from sponsored links that run next to search results.

Heap would not give exact traffic figures or say how much he was making in ad revenue, but he said the site had grown "exponentially" and was now servicing "hundreds of thousands of searches a day".

The site's growth since its launch in February this year is illustrated by a graph on the traffic monitoring website Alexa.

An industry source familiar with search engine marketing estimated Blackle, given such high traffic figures, earned thousands of US dollars in Google Adsense revenue per day.

"It [revenue] is definitely growing and I think if it keeps growing the way it's growing then I think it will become quite a healthy profit, so I hope that's what's going to happen," Heap said.

One of the technology enthusiasts to test whether or not the site's claims had any scientific grounding was Darren Yates, an Australian technology journalist who reviews computer hardware for computer magazines.

He found only tube-based CRT monitors, which have been phased out in favour of newer LCD-based models in most countries, showed any real difference in power consumption between Blackle and Google.

But even with a CRT monitor the drop in power consumption when searching through Blackle was a meagre 7 watts... more >>