Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches

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.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.

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Though Google says it is in the forefront of green computing, its search engine generates high levels of CO2 because of the way it operates. When you type in a Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to several competing against each other.

It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from whichever produces the answer fastest. The system minimises delays but raises energy consumption. Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.

Wissner-Gross has submitted his research for publication by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and has also set up a website www.CO2stats.com. “Google are very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy,” he said.

Google said: “We are among the most efficient of all internet search providers.”

Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO2 emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.

A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing director of carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO2 emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour, he says. of CO2 Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use).

Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian.

“It’s not an unreasonable comparison,” said Liam Newcombe, an expert on data centres at the British Computer Society. “It tells us how much energy westerners use on entertainment versus the energy poverty in some countries.”

Though energy consumption by computers is growing - and the rate of growth is increasing - Newcombe argues that what matters most is the type of usage.

If your internet use is in place of more energy-intensive activities, such as driving your car to the shops, that’s good. But if it is adding activities and energy consumption that would not otherwise happen, that may pose problems.

Newcombe cites Second Life and Twitter, a rapidly growing website whose 3m users post millions of messages a month. Last week Stephen Fry, the TV presenter, was posting “tweets” from New Zealand, imparting such vital information as “Arrived in Queenstown. Hurrah. Full of bungy jumping and ‘activewear’ shops”, and “Honestly. NZ weather makes UK look stable and clement”.

Jonathan Ross was Twittering even more, with posts such as “Am going to muck out the pigs. It will be cold, but I’m not the type to go on about it” and “Am now back indoors and have put on fleecy tracksuit and two pairs of socks”. Ross also made various “tweets” trying to ascertain whether Jeremy Clarkson was a Twitter user or not. Yesterday the Top Gear presenter cleared up the matter, saying: “I am not a twit. And Jonathan Ross is.”

Such internet phenomena are not simply fun and hot air, Newcombe warns: the boom in such services has a carbon cost.

Bookmarklet Add-on Stand-ins for Google Chrome

The ReadWriteWeb blog bemoans the lack of browser extension support in Google Chrome (so far), and offers a list of handy bookmarklets that can tide you over for now.

From Gmail This, to Dictionary, to Delicious 'marklets, this collection looks a lot like our top 10 useful bookmarklets. Of course, bookmarklets don't take up the memory or require installation like add-ons do, so these are worth dragging to your Firefox toolbar as well.

Internet Explorer Backup Zips Up All Your IE Settings

Windows only: If you never want to have to tweak Internet Explorer's settings again—and there are many, many settings—Backrex Internet Explorer Backup has you covered.

The small, step-by-step backup program grabs everything from Internet Explorer 6 or 7, including cookies, add-ons, auto-complete entries, connection settings, and, of course, your favorites .You back it all up to a zip file that's compressed and, if you'd like, password-protected, and can restore settings in the same click-by-click fashion. The app doesn't support the Internet Explorer 8 betas from what I can tell, but that may be on the way.

BackRex Internet Explorer is a free download for Windows systems only.

Google Pack updates: better screensaver, new AV and spyware apps

Google's updated their previously-posted Windows software package, Google Pack.

Changes to the Pack address our biggest initial complaint: that the original AV software, free for six months, would nag you for pay-for updates after the trial was over. Now Google's included the no-nag, no pay-for-updates-needed Norton Security Scan antivirus and PC Tools' Spyware Doctor Starter Edition. We're still fans of Ad-Aware for spyware scanning and ClamWin AV, but hey - at least GOOG's new choices are free.

Also, the screensaver (which was our favorite part) now supports photo feed slideshows, like from Flickr. Neat! — Gina Trapani

Google's new mobile search

Google has unveiled a redesigned mobile search interface with an emphasis on varied result types.

Rather than giving you choices for your search type (e.g., web, images, local listings), the new mobile search automatically searches across different Google search types and gives you a short list of results for each. The idea behind the new interface is to let you get the information you want with the least amount of click-work (useful for any mobile app). The results vary based on your search terms, so search results for Lifehacker start out with web pages, while a search for cat starts with stocks, cute images, then web pages. What do you think, mobile users, love it or lump it? Give us your thoughts in the comments. — Adam Pash

Google Mobile Search

Google Homepage adds thumbnail view of RSS feeds

Google Personalized Homepage lovers will be happy to see that Google has added quick previews to RSS feed widgets.

As you can see in the screenshot, feed items can now be expanded by clicking the plus sign (+) next to the title. The preview includes all of the text of the feed along with embedded images. While you probably wouldn't want to keep up with all of your reading this way (I'd suggest Google Reader for that), this nice new feature looks like a good way to keep an eye on a couple of your most important feeds wherever you are. — Adam Pash

Google Homepage adds personalized tabs

The very popular Google Homepage has just added the ability to add and personalize your own tabs.

The tabs are actually very cool. After clicking the "Add a tab" link, you can name your new tab, then drag and drop any of your Google Homepage modules back and forth between any of your tabs (you can't reorder your tabs, unfortunately). This control lets you organize and compartmentalize homepage components in very useful ways, and should also allow you to add or try out a lot more modules. I don't personally use Google Homepage, but I know that a lot of our readers do. Then again, it's features like this that make a service much more tempting to pick up. Let us know about your Google Homepage use in the comments. — Adam Pash

Google Web Toolkit(GWT) v1.5.3 - Google Web

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Release Notes for 1.5.3
Fixed Issues
RPC requests no longer fail on the embedded Android web browser
Leaf TreeItems now line up with their non-leaf siblings
Removing the last child node from a TreeItem no longer creates extra margins on the left
HTTPRequest no longer uses POST instead of GET on some IE installs because of incorrect XHR selection
Compiler now uses a more reliable check to prevent methods with local variables from being inlined
getAbsoluteTop()/Left() can no longer return non-integral values
Time.valueOf() no longer fails to parse "08:00:00" or incorrectly accepts "0xC:0xB:0xA".

Update：http://code.google.com/intl/zh-CN/webtoolkit/releases/release-notes-1....
Official Network：http://code.google.com/webtoolkit

Official download：
Windows：http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/files/gwt-windows-1.5.3.zip
Mac OS X：http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/files/gwt-windows-1.5.3.zip
Linux：http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/files/gwt-linux-1.5.3.tar.bz2

Kai-fu Lee said: CCTV reported adverse prepared

Perhaps it is because of Qingse spent most of the initial stage, three-year-old has been Google's China began to mature and become stable, "China," have begun to learn more and more of the tunnel. This is evident from the recent two months, Google's High-profile, we can see that can be quickly from the public relations ability to see the reaction. Morning, a CCTV broadcast the news, Google has been named in some of the existence of fake medical advertisements. Google I have the impression that a counter-reaction Lag, in the morning on the blog published in its review of the principles of advertising, the media convened in the afternoon rapid communication.
Kai-fu Lee said, "We expect that in the near future may be on the Google-related adverse reports." His smile was flashing, I know that the leak-speaking people of what is implied. I do not entangled in all kinds of dark and obscure in speculation. I Suffice it to say that in the commercialization of the media today, hardly any of the media are out of false advertising and illegal advertisements put up a struggle, including the paper appears to be just media, including CCTV. Who will remember that many of the paper media will be on the psoriasis - The ad nausea, no one will remember the famous CCTV on false advertising. Vis-à-vis the Internet, the only paper media and television media to monitor the cost and scope of the smaller number of them. And mutual supervision is necessary, self-restraint is necessary. But the commercial era of media rights police is not. Whether or Baidu, Google or that they should not be on their own full responsibility for errors or mistakes in this one, government regulation of the figure where? Perfect laws and regulations, the system Where are they? Concrete workable, enforceable rules to guide and where? Task for all but 14 years ago, a law on advertising, as well as a variety of complicated paper industry. Perhaps we neglected the most important subject .