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.
Recent articles
- Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025
- Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult - 24th November 2025
- sqlite-utils 4.0a1 has several (minor) backwards incompatible changes - 24th November 2025