Update:Turns out that the Times was mistaken in quoting Wissner-Gross as having said that it consumes that much energy to execute a Google search.
Harvard University Physicist, Alex Wissner-Gross, says that two search queries in Google consumes enough electricity to boil a kettle of tea. Considering that there are about 200m searches on Google per day, that is about a lake full of boiling water.
The main reason behind this consumption is the huge banks of servers in a data center that Google has dispersed around the world. Each search query entered in the search engine gets served from a data center closest to the person querying so that the results get back to him faster. The drive to deliver results and data faster is what’s causing all this consumption.
All I can say about this is that I hope Google is practising or at least thinking about regenerative heat technology, so that the waste heat generated can be recycled back into something useful.
Update: Google responds to this post, saying that they consume a whole lot less than the article estimates. According to them:
Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.
[source]
Category: Recycle
