January 13, 2009

Google search not so green

It has been estimated that a simple search on Google will produce around 7g of carbon dioxide, whereas boiling a kettle of water will produce around 15g of carbon dioxide.

These shocking figures have been produced by Dr Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist from Harvard University, who says that the emissions are produced by the electricity used by the users own computer and the equipment used by Google to produce the desired search result.

Even the average website consumes huge amounts of power around 0.2g of carbon dioxide per second; in fact, the emissions produced around two per cent of the worlds Co2 emissions and actually overtook the aviation industry’s carbon footprint in 2007.

Source [Telegraph]