Energy-Saving News

What Is The Carbon Footprint Of A Google Search?

Posted on 12. May, 2009 by Ross in Energy News

Searched this article using Google? Then you were just responsible for 0.2g of Google’s gigantic carbon footprint, according to the internet giant’s official blog.

In an effort to counter claims originally made by an article on the Times Online website that each Google search produces on average a whopping 7g of carbon, Google has tried to make public its own figures on the carbon footprint of its operations. It claims that each individual search query produces 0.2g of carbon dioxide from its secretive data centres - the Times Online article originally included the carbon cost of running the user’s PC on top of that, as well as the carbon footprint of the global internet infrastructure.

Of course, when scaled up by the number of searches per day that Google fields (462.3 million, according to comScore’s figures for March 2009) that equates to a massive quantity:

Google emits 96.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide every day from Google searches alone!

That’s nearly 34,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year! Whilst Google is focused upon driving this figure down with more efficient data centres, the ever-increasing complexity of its algorithms and of the volume of content on the internet makes this task much harder by requiring more and more processing power and storage.

No matter what Google does to minimise its footprint though, the original Times article highlights the fact that the lion’s share of the carbon footprint of search comes from the user’s PC. Rather than worrying about the efficiency of the internet services which the use, environmentally-orientated people should instead be concerned with the amount of time that they leave their computers on for, and how efficiently they use the that time.

Related posts:

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2. What Is The Carbon Footprint Of The Large Hadron Collider?
3. What is the Carbon Footprint of Spam?
4. The Carbon Footprint OF The World Cup: Blame FIFA, Not South Africa
5. What is the Carbon Footprint of Whaling?

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Tags: carbon footprint, google, search