Here's an interesting article I picked up on the web today.

Did you know that a monitor uses less watts to display a black page than it does displaying a white page?

So consider the fact that Google receives about 200 million queries a day. The almost all-white page of Google gets displayed on average for 10 to 15 seconds per query.

Now change the Google site to be almost all black. That's quite a bit of potential power saving going on there.

The unofficial calculation is that Google could be saving as much as 750 Megawatt-hours yearly!

Wonder if Google would ever consider turning their page black?

There are some sites running unofficial "Black Google" searches like the one over at Blackle, using a Google Custom search API to return Google search results to an almost all-black page.

They have a counter at the bottom claiming that they have saved more than 150 Megawatt-hours, although I don't know how accurate that counter is.

From my side, I don't know how practical it is, as light text on a dark background is harder to read, albeit only slightly harder. In the long run though, this could really hurt your eyes.

Also, with the advent of LCD monitors, maybe this change wouldn't make that big a difference?