Carbon Footprint huge from Googling
It has been estimated that two Google searches is equal to boiling a kettle in terms of carbon footprints.
This statistic has been worked out by a Havard boffin who worked out that googling produces huge amounts of CO2.
According to Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, a typical search on a desktop PC produces around 7g of CO2; this is disputed by Google who claim the figure is close 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.