Cheeseburger powers 15,000 Google searches

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 12 May 2009 at 09:37

Google's claiming that getting a single cheeseburger into the hands of a hungry American gobbles up as much carbon dioxide as 15,000 searches.

The figures are Google's latest attempt to play down reports that its huge data centres consume excessive amounts of energy - a claim it's been fending off since it was hit with false allegations earlier this year that two searches consume as much power as boiling a kettle.

"Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query uses about 1kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide," the company's senior vice president of operations, Urs Holzle, claims on the official Google blog.

That's a long way short of the 7g of carbon dioxide for a single Google search that was quoted in The Sunday Times, although the figures were later dismissed as a figment of the journalist's imagination by the scientist quoted in the report.

Based on its claimed figures, Google goes on to boast that the CO2 emissions of creating the average daily newspaper are equivalent to 850 Google searches, with one load in a dishwasher worth 5,100.

What Google isn't so keen to reveal is how many searches are performed on the site every day, although Comscore figures claim that 9.6 billion searches were performed in the US alone in July last year. Needless to say, you could cook a hell of a lot of cheeseburgers with the energy consumed.

Nevertheless, Google claims it's at the cutting edge of energy efficiency. "Through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centres by over 50%, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centres as the industry average," Holzle claims.

"This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query."