Simon Willison’s Weblog

Leo Hickman on the carbon cost of Googling. Alex Wissner-Gross (who published the 7g/search figures) appears to be including Google’s extra capacity, so total CO2 output divided by number of searches. Google’s 0.2g/search estimate includes just the energy used by the servers processing your query.

Posted 12th January 2009 at 3:31 pm

Tagged alexwissnergross, co2, google, leohickman

2 comments

Looks like it was the Sunday Times --not Wissner-Gross-- who were pushing the 7g/search/tea kettle figures.

According to Wissner-Gross, the study never even mentions Google.

"For some reason, in their story on the study, the Times had an ax to grind with Google," Wissner-Gross told TechNewsWorld. "Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a Web site."

And the example involving tea kettles? "They did that. I have no idea where they got those statistics," Wissner-Gross said.

huxley - 13th January 2009 17:23 - #
0.2g/search, "processing" the query. So it doesn't include storage, crawling the web or building the indexes?

Anonymous - 14th January 2009 07:29 - #

Comments are closed.