Google searches are eco-friendly after all

Updated tiger86 0 293 Views

I've criticized Google's waste of power in several of my blogs, and on my Well, thanks to someone who posted a comment and a link on one of my pro ecosia articles I found out about .

Google began their green movement in 2007 when they co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative to help make computers more energy effecient. Ecosia's video used to be hosted on youtube and said that one Google search was similar to turning on a regular light bulb. Well, now Ecosia has mysteriously changed their entire video and their video host as well. Why did they probably do this? Because Google owns youtube and they probably deleted their video and corrected their mistake.
Google claims that a single search using their search engine is one Killajoule or if I use that converts killajoules to watts*hours it is 0.277777778 WH per search.

This may surprise you but Google tries to roughly measure how much Co2 their search engine uses and than compare it to things that the everyday Joe uses. They claim that one morning newspaper is equivalent to 150 Google searches, and that the average American family uses the same amount of electricity per month that it takes to power 3,100,000 Google searches!

What really amazed me is that Google reuses everything, especially water. They are currently running two facilities that use 100 percent recycled water and they're goal is to have all of their data centers using 80 percent recycled water this year.

Why would money hungry Google care about going green?
Because they want to save money of course. You see, they save $30 a year per server than if they were to use the same amount of power as a regular server. Now I know $30 doesn't sound like a lot of money but when you take $30 plus 100,000 servers (well at least that was the rumored number two years ago) they're saving a big chunk of change!

I'm all about recycling but when I read how Google recycles their servers it made me a tad nervous.
They don't make it clear if they wipe all the information that they store on their servers before sending them out to be recycled. That's something I'd like them to come straight out and explain on their or even better on the official Google blog.

Dani AI

Generated

A brief update and a few clarifications tied to the original posts by , and .

The “one search = 1 kJ / 0.0003 kWh (~0.2 g CO2)” figure that started a lot of headlines comes from Google’s 2009 “Powering a Google search” explanation — it was an average, back‑of‑envelope estimate for an ordinary query and not a lifetime or fleet footprint. (publicpolicy.googleblog.com)

Since then Google has moved toward fleet‑level reporting (PUE, carbon‑free energy purchases, water stewardship) and annual environmental reports that give better context than a single per‑search sound bite. Modern fleet PUEs reported by Google sit around the low‑1.1 range and the company publishes its clean‑energy and water‑replenishment work in those reports. The recycled‑water cooling at Douglas County, GA, is one concrete example of those operational measures. (sustainability.google)

On retired hardware and privacy (the concern you raised, ): Google documents that storage media are tracked and sanitized using accepted standards, with cryptographic erasure and multi‑step verification used where appropriate. Drives that cannot be reliably sanitized are physically destroyed; customers can request evidence of sanitization. Those practices are described in Google Cloud’s deletion and media‑sanitization documentation. (cloud.google.com)

Practical takeaway: the old per‑search soundbite is fine for quick comparisons but it hides variability (what’s counted, network and client energy, caching, indexing). If the goal is lower impact, focus on reducing unnecessary queries, prefer services that publish fleet metrics, and for data privacy insist on documented sanitization or encryption/key‑deletion assurances. The “make everything black” idea mentioned by (the third‑party Blackle concept) was a gimmick with marginal savings on modern LCD/LED displays. (techcrunch.com)

Member Avatar for ameto
ameto 0 Newbie Poster

Really interesting article....never think about this.

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theemerchant -2 Junior Poster in Training

yeah I agree with this post, google also release the SE before i think it's all black i just forgot the name which will serve as to not consume more on electricity

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