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Googling has a massive carbon footprint

by on12 January 2009

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Updated: Two searches equal boiling a kettle of water


A Harvard
boffin has worked out that googling produces significant amounts of carbon dioxide, stating two search requests create as much CO2 as boiling a kettle of water, which sounds quite high if you ask us.

Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claims a typical search on a desktop PC produces around 7g of CO2, although Google claims the figure is closer to 0.2g. Dr Wissner-Gross says Google uses multiple data banks at the same time to speed up its search operations, and that a combination of servers, clients, networks and end user PCs all add up to the high CO2 cost of Google's operation.

Gartner bean counters claim IT currently accounts for around 2 percent of global CO2 emissions, and Dr Wissner-Gross is trying to lend a helping hand, launching a site called co2stats.com, which should help tech companies identify energy inefficient aspects of their operations.

More here.

Update:

Dr Wissner-Gross has since accused the Times of doing a rather poor job reporting on his study, and claims never to have mentioned Google in it, nor the 7g of CO2 emissions caused by Google searches.

 

Harvard boffin slams newspaper over Google CO2 report

Last modified on 13 January 2009
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