Znout: Inspired

Green weaver seeks
Cyber bits of fertile thought
Znout: find your vision.

I'm so jazzed about Znout that it inspired me to haiku! Znout is an alternative search engine that uses ad dollars to buy renewable energy consumption credits to offset CO2 emissions associated with search engine activity. Free to you and me. www.znout.org.

Just Do It. Add Znout as your home page or as a secondary home page that pops open automatically when you open your browser. Directions:

IE7 & IE8 users: click Tools on your browser menu, select Internet Options, and then add http://www.znout.org/ to the list of tabs that open automatically (in the open box under Home Page). Anyone reading this who uses a different browser, I'd appreciate it if you'd please leave directions in the comments section.

More info from Znout's About section is below. If you're so inspired, leave me a haiku in the comments!

How it works - Znout

From Znout's website:

A Google query consumes as much energy as one hour of light "A single Google query consumes as much energy as an 11-watt light bulb does in one hour." (perpenduum.com).

"Electricity generation required for information and communication technologies is currently responsible for 2% of global CO2 emissions" (Techcrunch)

Thus the CO2 emission of the IT industry totalizes to even more than the emission of the whole worldwide aviation industry.

The solution: Znout "Znout" stands for "zero negative output". Znout is a CO2 neutral Internet search engine that turns your web searches into green web searches.

How it works: The whole energy consumption at Znout is being measured by us and our independent partner CO2stats.

We measure not only the energy consumption of our own servers, but also the CO2 emission of the whole network infrastructure that is being used. Even the energy consumption of your own computer is being statistically determined and added to the sum.

At the end of each month renewable energy certificates (similar to carbon credits) are being bought in order to balance out the environmental footprint caused by Znout. This makes your searches become eco-friendly.

Znout finances the purchase of these CO2 certificates solely from advertising revenue. So for Znout users searching green is absolutely free.

So far more than 4,238,522 watt hours have been "turned green" thanks to Znout. You can click here to have a look at the environmental footprint of Znout and see how much carbon dioxide we currently save.

Other good reasons to use ZnoutZnout is not only eco-friendly; there are many other good reasons to use Znout:

Privacy: We do not save any user data, search queries or IP addresses in order to protect your privacy.

Best search results: Thanks to our partnership with Google we can deliver you excellent search results. So "Zero negative output" is also true for the results you get at Znout.

Independence: Though we partner with Google, we don't depend only on their services. Thus we can also offer you other search functions like Wikipedia search or dictionary search.

Search plugin for browser: With the Znout search plugin you can search the web much faster than you did before by using our indicators.

Save energy: In the upper right corner of our starting page you can set up a black background color for Znout. This will save you up to 30% energy while you search the web.