The energy consumption of search engine usage on the Internet has been a hot topic in the beginning of last year, especially for Google. The environmental impact of searches has been analyzed and has led to a story which made world wide news.
Since then Google has announced a lot of “green projects” on their website, adding up to their huge corporate solar panel installation in California. Apart from Google many other search engines are on the market and some of them label themselves “eco-friendly” or claim to “safe the rainforest”.
One example is Ecosia - an eco-friendly Internet search engine backed by Yahoo, Bing and the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF). Ecosia gives at least 80% of its advertising revenue to a rainforest protection program run by the WWF.
Other examples include Blackle, which claims to safe Energy through providing an interface with a black screen and thus lowering the energy consumption on consumers' displays (instead of Google's white screen). Here is a list of other green search engines.
In all cases it makes sense to surf consciously and to look closely if something is really being done right, or if it's just greenwashing.
