Although the American search engine is renowned for returning fast results, Dr Wissner-Gross says it can only do so because it uses several data banks at the same time.More info at BBC News. Google disputes Wissner-Gross' figures and claims a search generates only 0.2g of CO2.
Speaking to the BBC, he said a combination of clients, networks, servers and people's home computers all added up to a lot of energy usage.
"Google isn't any worse than any other data centre operator. If you want to supply really great and fast result, then that's going to take extra energy to do so," he said.
Report: One Google search results in 7g CO2
Posted on Tuesday, January 13 2009 @ 0:27 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck