AN ECOLOGY site claims that Google could save the world a lot of lecky by changing its web design.All Google has to do is change its home page from a electricity sucking white colour, to a more eco-friendly black.According to TreeHugger.com, here, a cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor uses about 74 watts to display an all white web page, but only uses 59 watts to display an all black page.Said that there are a lot of CRT monitors out there, which means that they waste energy displaying white backgrounds.If Google, which gets about 200 million queries a day, displays each query for about 10 seconds, it means that it will burn 550,000 hours every day on desktops.A shift to a black background will save a total of 15 watts. If a quarter of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's about $75,000 a year.
SAN FRANCISCO - Sprucing up its famously plain Web site, Google Inc. is offering a new option that plants its Internet search box in panoramic settings that change with the time of day and the outside weather.The colorful graphics to be unveiled Tuesday represent the latest bit of pizzaz to be served up on Google's home page as the Mountain View-based company caters to the digerati who want to customize everything from their cell phones to their computers.
The sounds of the planet are to be linked to Google Earth to enable users to hear what a place sounds like, as well as what it used to sound like.Bernie Krause has spent 40 years collecting the sounds, and his company Wild Sanctuary has accumulated over 3,500 hours of recordings, covering everything from the cracking of glaciers to midnight in the jungle.The enhancement to Google Earth will be available for download following its launch at the Where 2.0 conference on 29 May.
