Research counts carbon cost of ‘googling’

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A Harvard University academic has claimed to have worked out how much carbon dioxide (CO2) every Google search contributes to the environment.

US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross has said the same amount of CO2 is produced for every two Google searches as is created when boiling a kettle.

Google has been quick to refute the claims with figures of its own, while saying the impact of ‘googling’ is minimal, particularly when compared to alternative information searches, which tend to rely on travelling to a library and paper.

The study carried out by Wissner-Gross found each desktop computer Google search generated about seven grams (0.25oz) of CO2. Twice that amount is equivalent to using an electric kettle to boil water.

The calculations were based on the power consumed both by a desktop PC and the network of data centres around the world that run Google’s search systems, where some 200 million internet searches are carried out every day.

And the very fact that Google uses many data banks simultaneously to produce its results quickly also meant it produced more CO2 than its competitors.

Urs Hölzle, Google operations senior vice president, responded to the researcher’s findings in a blog posting that said it took the environmental issued raised “seriously” as part of its efforts to build more energy efficient data centres.

It countered the figures of Wissner-Gross with some of its own, claiming the physicist’s estimates were “many times too high”.

“In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2g of CO2,” stated the search giant, which it also said was equivalent to the same amount of energy the average human body burns in just 10 seconds.

Hölzle explained: “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.”

Analyst firm Gartner last year claimed the IT industry was responsible for about two per cent of global CO2 emissions, which is equivalent to that of the aviation industry.

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