Green Search Engine Forestle Gets the Boot from Google

Just four days after it went public, green search engine Forestle was forced to shut down due to a decision by Google to end their partnership. Google claims that Forestle offered incentives to artificially click on sponsored links.  Forestle disagrees with Google’s assertion and says they’re working on getting the issue clarified so they can get back up and running.

The new green search engine delivered results through Google and money was made through sponsored advertising links at the top of each results page.  The site’s income from the sponsored links, minus administrative costs, goes to the Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre program, which helps sustain rainforests.  Within four days of operation, Forestle says 15,000 total square yards of rainforest were saved.

From ars technica:

Forestle insists that, despite what Google thinks, it did not offer incentives to click on sponsored links or ads. At the top of every search result page, the company displayed a note explicitly saying not to click on Google sponsored links unless users are truly interested in them. “You harm Forestle, Google and the advertising websites with artificial clicking,” reads the warning. Apparently that’s not enough for Google, though, and perhaps the only incentive required to pull the plug is the mere admission that Forestle was making money on advertising that it planned to donate to charity.

Forestle goes on to accuse Google of ending the partnership because Forestle ‘became too successful’.  They’re asking users and bloggers to rally to bring them back, and to use another green search engine, Znout, in the meantime.  Znout doesn’t donate money to green charities, they just claim to reduce energy using black backgrounds (which doesn’t really work, by the way) and EcoServers.
Link [ars technica]

Green Urban Myth: Can We Please Kill the Idea that Black Screens Save Energy?

ReadWriteWeb published a nice little write-up on Earth Day about the best green search engines, with a list that included Green Maven, Greensie, Blackle, Searchgreener and EcoSeek, among others. How can a search engine be eco-friendly? Well, some of them, like Green Maven, search the ‘green web’, bringing you the latest eco-news and media. Others, like Ecocho, plant trees each time you reach a set amount of searches, providing a nice way to offset carbon while doing what you need to do on the web.

Some, however, are a little slow, shall we say: they’re still running on the concept that a black screen saves energy. Blackle, Eco-find and Earthle’s black backgrounds are the only supposed eco friendly benefit to their use. Here’s the thing: unless you’re still using an old CRT monitor, it’s not even true. Call it a green technology urban myth. It’s time to give this misinformation a boot in the ass. Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal crunched the numbers nearly a year ago, and Bill Schindler of Panasonic Plasma Display Laboratory of America confirmed his findings.

Scientific American summed it up:

CRT monitors, which until a few years ago were the predominant models among PC users, consume more power when a computer screen is white. To confirm this, Schindler measured the energy output of an 18-inch (45.7-centimeter) CRT monitor and found it used 102 watts when the screen was white but only 79 watts when the display was black.

This is not the case, however, with LCD monitors, which have no phosphors and represent the lion’s share of every new monitored purchased in the developed world, including those used by laptops. Instead, LCD displays rely on an array of thin-tube fluorescent bulbs that provide a constant source of light to create a white screen. To make it black, LCDs rely on a diffuser to block this light. As a result, LCDs use more energy than CRTs to display a black screen. Measuring a 17-inch (43-centimeter) LCD monitor, Schindler found that white required 22.6 watts, while black came in a tad higher at 23.2 watts. With a 20-inch (50.8-centimeter) LCD, black required 6 percent more energy than white.

It’s time for Blackle and the others to make a change: they meant well, but the fact is their black search engines are actually accomplishing the opposite of their goal. They’re using more energy, and misleading people who want to help out the environment in any small way they can.

What’s even more annoying about this is the fact that this information has been available for so long. We’ve known about it since last May, and the black-screen search engines haven’t made a change. Um, hello? News flash, literally: y’all are now officially a year behind the times, and during that year, you’ve done more harm than good. It’s time to pat the black screen myth on the head, thank it for trying and quietly send it off to the place outdated eco practices go to die.

Link [ReadWriteWeb] + [Scientific American]