14 DAY TRIAL // Google is disputing claims of a high search carbon footprint following a report authored by US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross. The Mountain View-search giant indicated that a single Google Search produced nowhere near the 7 grams of CO2, as Wissner-Gross had pointed out. In this regard, the company made its own calculations, and concluded that a sole Google search yields approximately 0.2 grams of CO2, but nowhere near 7 grams.
“Recently, though, others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses 'half the energy as boiling a kettle of water' and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds.” Urs Holzle, senior vice president, Operations, stated.
“Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ.”
The Mountain View-based search giant claims that it has designed and put together the most energy-efficient data centers worldwide, a move which is illustrative of its commitment to decreasing the amount of energy consumed by information technology. In this regard, Google emphasized that the energy used to “power” a query through its search engine was minimal.
“For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds. In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2,” Holzle added.