Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches

Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea. Interesting TimesOnline Article by Jonathan Leake and Richard Woods

UPDATE: Google disagrees.

(via jakehimself twitter)

6 Comments leave a comment below

  1. The google blog has responded to this saying that it’s inaccurate. Their math works out to 1,000 Google searches using as much CO2 as an average car driving 0.6 miles

    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-search.html

  2. I think it would be much more interesting to know what was the enviromental impact of doing the same research of a typical Google Search before the internet ever existed. That would be a point, this is just some estadistically interesting demagogy.

    By the way Tina, as this is my first comment here after months of reading this blog, hi from Spain. Your Swissmiss is in my opinion the tastiest, most beautiful point of view (this is more than a blog) out there.

  3. “Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

    Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002

    In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

    We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.”

    http://www.blackle.com/

  4. “Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

    Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002

    In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

    We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.”

    http://www.blackle.com/

  5. Alex Wissner-Gross’s says any reference to Google is something the Times “just pulled out of thin air.”

    source: http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/01/12/tempest-in-a-tea-kettle-co2stats-founder-caught-in-frenzy-around-environmental-costs-of-a-google-search/

  6. Google’s responses to both Blackle and the CO2 issue on are point.
    The response to CO2 usage was posted in this thread’s first comment, with the response to Blackle here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.html (In short, using Blackle can actually _increase_ power consumption in some cases).

    Think about it this way: given Google’s massive infrastructure, it is in the company’s best interest to pay attention to operational costs, which include power consumption, cooling, all the things that a data center needs to deal with but also have environmental effects. Decreasing their “carbon footprint” has immediate financial payoffs plus the added PR, so why _wouldn’t_ they work to further decrease any negative effect they may have on the Earth?