Google's a bit gassy

[Emporius]

Apparently every search you make releases the equivalent of about 7 grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

A Harvard physicist and green-website founder's assertion that running two Google searches released the same amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as boiling a kettle of tea has caused a tempest in a you-know-what.

Chief among the detractors is Google Senior vice president of operations Urs H?lzle, who wrote in the company's blog that a typical Google search requires far less energy, and therefore releases far less CO2 equivalent greenhouse gas than Wissner-Gross's figures:

"In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don't reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those of in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches."

This was something I had never thought about, and considering the amount of searches I've made over a lifetime I'm feeling a little conflicted.

 

[NeptuneUK]

I wish I gave a shit about my carbon footprint.
Wait, I don't.

 

[Dan]

I wish I gave a shit about my carbon footprint.
Wait, I don't.

The I don't part is redundant and reverses the meaning of what you just said.

If any rich Westerners really cared about shrinking their carbon footprint they would just kill themselves and make it 0, or however much cremation gives off.

 

[Tyguy]

how does a google search release co2 again?

 

[mortiz-Redux]

Something to do with dragons

 

[danitiwa]

lol. Does this mean I should switch to Yahoo or something?

 

[Dan]

how does a google search release co2 again?

Google has a special reserve of natural gas stored under their secret complex. Every 1 000 000 searches, they flare off the stack with a huge fireball as a celebration to their internet dominance.

 

[G(ordon)-man]

A Google worker farts every time i search?

 

[Tyguy]

Google has a special reserve of natural gas stored under their secret complex. Every 1 000 000 searches, they flare off the stack with a huge fireball as a celebration to their internet dominance.

im 75 percent sure your lying and 50 percent sure you're not

 

[Llama]

That's almost 100% !

 

[CyberPitz]

Man this is why they should have NEVER gotten rid of Search.com.

 

[Raziaar]

Google has a special reserve of natural gas stored under their secret complex. Every 1 000 000 searches, they flare off the stack with a huge fireball as a celebration to their internet dominance.

This is exactly what I was thinking.

 

[theotherguy]

Google has a special reserve of natural gas stored under their secret complex. Every 1 000 000 searches, they flare off the stack with a huge fireball as a celebration to their internet dominance.

LOL!

But in all seriousness (for those who were asking), whenever you do a Google search, your query is sent off to massively parallel computer clusters run by Google, which all run the page rank algorithm together to produce fast results. This uses a lot of energy, but its not like they wouldn't be using all of that energy if they weren't doing your particular search.

 

[Shamrock]

Incorrect!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/1...-that-stuff-about-google-and-the-tea-kettles/

 

[Asus]

But you also have to consider if there are things you search for (or do anything else online) that if you didn't use their servers would you be producing more CO2 yourself...
Instead of driving to the store to buy or browse a lot of people do it online etc.
Same with driving to the library vs researching via searches on google.

 

[nipples]

Don't people have better things to be doing?

 

[JFry]

Good point Asus. If you really feel bad about it just decide against driving to the store or something one time and you've basically covered your searches for several years unless you are a compulsive searcher or something.

Don't people have better things to be doing?

Yea really, I wonder what the carbon footprint of conducting this study was?

 

[L3N!N]

Point in case:

The new Google favicon is indeed warding off people, and thus searches. Therefore, we can reduce that through bad design we have saved the environment.

Another smart plan from the radical minds at Google.

 

[Bad^Hat]

Edit: ^ I really hope that isn't true. Also, deduce.

I ****ing knew Google was midget-powered.

Midgets are surprisingly gassy.

 

[Kula Meenur]

Google has a special reserve of natural gas stored under their secret complex. Every 1 000 000 searches, they flare off the stack with a huge fireball as a celebration to their internet dominance.

Oh god help me stop lolling

 

[Kyorisu]

This was something I had never thought about, and considering the amount of searches I've made over a lifetime I'm feeling a little conflicted.

Google places data centres as close as possible to the power source to minimise transmission loss, whilst running on green energy like Hydro. The article in question was debunked on /. a while ago. The math to determine the CO2 emissions is broken anyway.

 

[Sandspider]

This has been revealed as a hoax!

 

[Sulkdodds]

I consistently misread this as 'google's a bit sassy'

 

[soulslicer]

We need to use google black.. that should cancel out the emissions..

http://www.blackle.com/

 

[Eejit]

That's racialist!

 

[No Limit]

Well those servers will remain on either way. So I don't know how you can really measure the carbon foot print of a google search.

 

[Asus]

You would probably need to find the max power used when a server is @ 100% load and the max amount of searches that could be performed within that snapshot. Average it out.

My PC uses ~100 watts when on but just idle. When under load it goes up to ~200 watts used from the wall outlet.
So if google's servers are idle they will use less energy than if they are being used.

 

[No Limit]

True, but 1 google search uses virtually no processor power. I would guess it would take hundreds of searches at the exact same time for those CPUs to start feeling heat. So if you cut back your google consumption you really won't be cutting off .2 grams of CO2 by not searching. Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting statistic taken collectively but a much more useful figure would be how much CO2 their entire datacenter puts out each month.