A story in the Sunday Times of London sent Google’s public relations machine into an advanced search for answers. The Times reporters wrote about a new Harvard study that examines the energy impact of Web searches. The story’s lead paragraph: “Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.”
One problem: the study’s author, Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, says he never mentions Google in the study. “For some reason, in their story on the study, the Times had an ax to grind with Google,” Wissner-Gross told TechNewsWorld. “Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a Web site.”
And the example involving tea kettles? “They did that. I have no idea where they got those statistics,” Wissner-Gross said.
Was Google Burned by Energy Story?
The Times story is giving Google a chance to talk about the company’s green initiatives and its efforts to pursue cleaner energy technologies on several fronts, Google spokesperson Jamie Yood said. “This comes from the top, from (cofounders) Larry (Page) and Sergey (Brin), who are really dedicated to this. There’s an acknowledgment that Google is using energy and on the business front it makes sense to get this energy cost as low as possible,” Yood told TechNewsWorld. “And on the environmental front, they are passionate about climate change and are really involved. They recognize that if we’re going to use energy, let’s try to figure out how to do this as minimally as possible.”
That includes the use of biodiesel shuttles and electric cars to and from its Mountain View, Calif., campus, offering bikes for employees to ride from building to building on that campus, and using recyclable materials throughout those buildings. And when it comes to its server farms, “we do believe we have the most energy efficient data centers.”
Google takes exception on its Official Google blog to the statistics quoted in the Times story regarding the energy used to Web search vs. boiling a kettle of water. A speedy search uses less energy, the company claims; about the same amount of energy as the human body uses in about 10 seconds.
Google has asked to see a copy of the study, and Wissner-Gross says he is more than happy to send them one.
One of the Times article’s authors had interviewed a Google engineer “whose job is to look at data centers to make sure they’re more energy efficient, and he didn’t really use any of his material,” Yood said.
Google’s Side of Things
Greenpeace doesn’t really focus on the energy efficiencies used by Google or Web companies in general, said spokesperson Daniel Kessler. It is more focused on electronics products, the toxic materials used and company recycling initiatives. However, Google gets high marks for its green efforts in Washington D.C., Kessler said. “I commend Google for its lobbying and the legislative work they’re doing when it comes to clean energy,” Kessler told TechNewsWorld. “In the whole tech sector, they’re really on the forefront on taking action regarding the climate.”
Google’s data centers burn through a lot of energy in the course of providing answers to search queries around the world, and the cheapest form of that energy right now is coal, said Roger Kay, principal at Endpoint Technologies Associates, who keeps a close eye on the environmental policies at IT companies.
“It’s taking that electricity bill they’ve got and kind of making it a proportion of the total expenditure of the generation of electricity, and then allocating that as a cost to Google and saying that’s their responsibility, their piece of it,” Kay told TechNewsWorld. “It’s just modeling, a modeling exercise that may not necessarily be a reflection of reality.”
The location of the information needed in a Web search may also play a part, Kay said. “If you’re looking for the latest on Brad Pitt, then that’s likely to be stored in multiple servers towards the edge of the network, where it will be an easy search. Google through its traffic management knows a lot of people are interested in that. But if you want to read Cicero’s works, which haven’t been read for a while, you may have to go deep into the network.”
The Researcher’s Take
Wissner-Gross, who manages the Web site CO2stats.com to help educate people about energy efficiencies on the Internet, has been inundated with press requests since the Times story was published. The Times quoted him correctly in the story as saying, “A Google search has a definite environmental impact” and “Google operates huge data centers around the world that consume a great deal of power,” he confirmed.
“I don’t think anybody would disagree with those statements,” Wissner-Gross said. “Everything online has a definite environmental impact. I think everybody can agree on that, including Google.”
There’s a difference between regular servers and those used in advanced data centers, Wissner-Gross said, and he acknowledges that Google would have a financial interest in maintaining an energy-efficient infrastructure. “Energy consumption may be a higher fraction of infrastructure costs for large companies like Google than the hardware itself.”
In between answering reporters’ e-mails and appearing on CNBC, Wissner-Gross has had a lot of time to think about why the Sunday Times focused on Google in its story. “The short answer is, it’s a really easy way to sell papers. Google is a very successful company and it’s a very easy way to get readership by making grandiose claims about them.”
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This story in the Sunday Times of London shows the continuing erosion of the credibility of so called "news stories" and their reporters.
I learned early in life {I AM now 74} that if a person is going to write about anything, he should strive to get his facts straight before penning them for the world to see and read.
Are the so called journalists of today so incompetent at their trade that they must resort to half-facts or manufactured ‘facts’ to present to their readers?
It is no wonder that newspaper companies are in trouble financially. Who will pay to read such nonsense.
Charcar682
Intelligent people search with Google powered http://www.treehoo.com that plants trees for the profit, their slogan is "You surf – we plant trees" it’s great!
In the words of its own CEO, Google has helped to turn online content and services into a cesspool of misinformation… No wonder it makes a lot of CO2 in the process.
But what is even more polluting is not the searches as much as the ads that accompany the "seemingly free" indexing and the display of results.
Has anyone tried to calculate how much energy (and thus CO2) and broadband is consumed by all these "Google’s sponsored" links and banner ads? And, who pays for that? I wonder if Google’s PR department could tell us how much the Google Business Model costs the society in terms of the additional energy needed to transfer and display all the ads?
Well, there’s lies, damn lies and statistics.
The Google server farms may well only use 0.2g CO2 PER SEARCH but they don’t, magically, turn on, do the search and then turn off. They are on all the time consuming many many times the energy of a single search. I’m AM azed, actually, you can measure the CO2 of a single search, this shows how enormous the overall energy consumption must be! If the good doctor is right, 7g/search and Google are right, 0.2 g/search, it just means that google have 35 times more servers than they need to service their search load. This is probably about right as google needs to respond instantly all the time. They might get away with 20 times, but probably no less to guarantee a result in a good time. Anything we do on this earth requires energy which has a CO2 impact. If we want instant search results I’m afraid you have to get used to it, either that or google your way to fusion power!
Google can try to greenwash its voracious energy hunger all it can, and pimp out a few feel-good initiatives such as the annoying electric vehicles that prowl its campus, but while its two manchild founders cavort around the world on their own private wide-body jet burning a typical individual’s lifetime’s worth of CO2 for quick jaunts to the Caribbean, we know that’s all rubbish! The greenwash rot starts at the top and percolates down from there. If Google really cared, it would make its server infrastructure public, publish its auditted CO2 emissions, and pledge to become CO2 neutral in a public, transparent fashion. Microsoft has made its server infrastructure information public, why not Google?