Ang Peregrino Recommends 55: EcoSmartSearch

EcoS­mart­Search
URL: http://​www​.ecos​mart​search​.com/

For us to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how use­ful and good EcoS­mart Search is, check out the news bit below:

BLACK IS THE NEW WHITE
A teenager’s inven­tion to help save the planet.

WHEN THIRTEEN-YEAR-old Andrew Davey read a blog by a lead­ing expert in green com­put­ing, explain­ing how chang­ing from a white back­ground com­puter screen to a black one could save energy, he decided to put the the­ory to the test. He is now the proud owner of an environmentally-friendly search engine called Ecos​mart​search​.com — a search engine with the motto “We are sav­ing energy, now it’s your turn”.

Andrew’s search engine uses a black back­ground which saves energy because the com­puter mon­i­tor uses 59 watts to pro­duce the image on the screen, whereas a white or light screen uses 74 watts to dis­play the image. This means that every time ecos​mart​search​.com is used, it saves 15 watts. As it is Google-powered the search results are exactly the same but use less energy.

The blog which inspired Andrew to invent his search-engine explains the maths: “Google gets about 200 mil­lion queries a day. Assum­ing each query is dis­played for about 10 sec­onds, that means Google is run­ning for about 550,000 hours every day. If users run Google in the usual full-screen mode, the shift to a black back­ground would save a total of 8.3 megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 megawatt-hours per year.” Andrew realised that was a whole lot of carbon-dioxide that could be saved from enter­ing the atmosphere.

So Andrew got to work. “I’ve always been good at com­put­ers and I had pre­vi­ously made a web­site for my Dad’s small medal busi­ness. I came up with the idea of an eco-friendly search engine as I want to be an entre­pre­neur and help stop global warming”.

Andrew had been learn­ing about energy-saving issues at Wok­ing High School. When he showed his search-engine to his teach­ers, they were very impressed and started to use it. “My friends really like it too” says Andrew. “I’m just try­ing to get them out of the habit of using Google! I think help­ing the envi­ron­ment is a great thing to do. Every lit­tle helps”.

That is why I’m using EcoS­mart­Search when I google stuff on the inter­net. I still use the orig­i­nal google when I look for images though (google has a bet­ter search func­tion for images than the one used by EcoS­mart­Search), but all in all, I’ve been using EcoS­mart­Search to do my share. I’ve also changed my desk­top image into some­thing darker like this:

Do your part. Make EcoS­mart­Search your new search page!

For teach­ing us that no mat­ter what age you are, we could all do some­thing to help our envi­ron­ment with very ele­gant solu­tions, AngPere­grino Rec­om­mends EcoS­mart Search this week.