Several online journals have published certain data, regarding the influence of Google searches carbon footprint (the mass equivalent of carbon dioxide produced) over the environment. According to the results obtained by the physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, a typical Google search leads to the production of 7g of CO2 (carbon dioxide), while the browsing of a simple website generates an amount of 0.02g of CO2 per second and in case of a complex one that has videos and images 0.2g of CO2.

In response, Google Official Blog published a different value corresponding to the carbon footprint of a single Google search: 0.2g of CO2 produced in 0.2 seconds. This quantity of CO2 requires an energy of 1KJ, the equivalent of the energy burned by a human body in ten seconds.

The value of single Google search carbon footprint obtained by Wissner-Gross is with several order of magnitude higher that the one provided by Google Official Blog. At first sight, the value of 7g of CO2 suggest the fact that Google searches contribute with a high percent to the global CO2 emissions, given the high number of search engine users worldwide and the number of queries per second if we take into account only the searches.

From a realistic point of view, this value of 7g of CO2 should not be regarded as an exact measure of CO2 emissions determined by a Google search from many reasons.

In the first place, even this value is correlated in a rough manner with the results obtained by John Buckley, who situates the carbon footprint of a Google search in the range 1-10g CO2, both of them were estimated with different models and are influenced by various parameters. Practically, from the theoretical point of view, the calculation of the value of the quantity of CO2 generated by a Google search is a complex problem because there are two many dynamic variables needed to be taken into account in order to obtain a result close to the real value.

Comparing the estimated values with the real one (0.2 g CO2) for a Google search, the correlation degree is low, result which suggest an improvement of the theoretical model used. On the other hand, not the CO2 generated by a Google search should be a concern, because the contribution of CO2 at the greenhouse effect is approximately only 9%, as compared with water vapor 36%, according to Wikipedia.

And even more, all values attributed to the Google search footprint must be interpreted statistically: a certain estimated value is more or less close to the real one due to the CO2 emissions fluctuations in time. The fluctuations are induced by several parameters like number of users, queries and active data centers, not to mention specific variables that directly influence the CO2 production such as type of material used to produce the required energy, temperature, pressure and more.

As a consequence, Google search queries are not a real danger for the environment equilibrium stability. If you want to obtain an estimation of your website carbon footprint and optimize it, CO2Stats web service helps webmasters to have a carbon neutral website. Having a website with a low carbon footprint could determine the increase of the traffic and the return of the unique visitors.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 3:30 am and is filed under Google methods & tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.