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Saving the planet one Internet search at a time
10 Web search engines that help the planet as you search.
Tue, May 05 2009 at 6:00 PM
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Photo: Green Planet Search
You may recall several months ago the media frenzy around the carbon footprint of a Google search. One scientist performed a calculation allocating about 3.5 grams of CO2 per search, a figure which Google hotly contested.
One search engine, Blackle, reduces this impact by simply making the screen all black with white letters, a simple feature which (according to their counter) has saved over 1.2 million of watt-hours of electricity to date.
Now a bevy of new green search engines is pushing the carbon-free searching envelope by contributing directly to the environment each time you search. A great top 10 list of green search engines was put together by Saikat Besu of MakeUseOf. Some of my favorites:
Forestle saves 1/10th of a meter of rainforest (about 4" x 4") per search, so in about 40,468 searches you could plant a whole acre. I probably do about 20 Google searches per day (7,200 per year) so in about 5 1/2 years I would save a whole acre of rainforest. Forestle does their rainforest protecting through a partnership with The Nature Conservancy.
Znout is from the same company but uses Google instead of Yahoo, and instead of rainforests they carbon-offset their IT energy consumption by using ad revenue to pay for REC's (or Renewable Energy Credits).
Green Planet Search is less functional but more slick. The website custom aggregates a wide variety of content including news, blogs and products.
GreenMaven curates the top content sources specifically targeting content for the eco-friendly. It has mapped over 10,000 sites and includes 4,000 business listings.
There are a bunch more. Check out the full post to learn about TrueVert, EcoSeek, ClimateGift and more.
Related posts:
- The Carbon Impact of Googling
- Top 5 trends shaping the green web
The opinions expressed by MNN Bloggers and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not reflect the opinions of MNN.com. While we have reviewed their content to make sure it complies with our Terms and Conditions, MNN is not responsible for the accuracy of any of their information.
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Displaying a white screen on your monitor actually uses less energy than displaying a black page. So all of these black search engines that claim to be green are stupid.
This is just another piece of evidence that it is certainly doing pretty well!
Shoot yourself in the brains, less brains, less C02.
what a bunch of MORONS!
This is is akin to saying that swatting a mosquito is harming the environment.
We know about Black Google called Blackle. But i raise the question dose concentrating on these stuff will really help saving the planet. This is much of a show off then some real effort to make this world beautiful. There are so many other important task to then pressurizing google to make the screen black. I guess we are loosing the track.
I do think that if Google want to improve their image they need to do more to offset their contribution to climate change. If the stats are true then they should really put in more of an effort to become more energy efficient.