Web searches wreck environment
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 12 January 2009, 23:35 IST   |    1 Comments
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Bangalore: Though technology has greatly contributed to the advancement of human life, the same badly impacts the environment. The case is not different in terms of website search also as a single Google search generates about 7 g of carbon dioxide. As more than 200 million people are estimated to search internet everyday, the effect would be serious as it increases electricity consumption and green house gas emission. "Google operates huge data centers around the world that consume a great deal of power and Google search has a definite impact on environment," opined Alex Wissner, a Harvard University physicist, whose is about to conclude a research on the environmental impact of computing. However, Google is keeping silent about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. The locations of dozens of its data centers are also unknown. According to a recent Gartner study, the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world's airlines, which is about two percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. "Data centers are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable," said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Google's search engines generate high levels of carbon dioxide because of the way it operates. For instance, when we type something in a Google search for information, our request doesn't go to just one server, instead it goes several ones competing against each other. Google takes data from whichever products that answer fastest. Though the system minimizes delay, it increases energy consumption. Google has servers in U.S., Europe, Japan and china. As per the Mills' research, viewing a simple website page generates about 0.02 g of carbon dioxide per second. This rises about tenfold to about 0.2g of carbon dioxide a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.

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