Google Not so Evil After All

Written by Gary Robinson

Apparently, Google isn’t causing the end of life as we know it after all (at least not environmentally).

According to TechCrunch, it seems that the Times might have been a little over zealous in the writing of the article, latching on to Google as the culprit. At the centre of the controversy, is the claim “that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea”.

Well apparently, the research’s author, Alex Wissner-Gross never even said that. According to TechCrunch…

For starters, he says he would never refer to any sort of measurement having to do with tea (he’d go with coffee). But his findings have nothing to do with Google as a company, either – they’re concerned with much more generalized stats, like your computer’s rate of CO2 production when you look at a webpage.

Wissner-Gross says that the widely circulated 7 gram/search figure came from some other source (he’s not sure where), and notes that if you read the article carefully it only makes it sound like it’s from his data. He has confirmed that he did make some vague statements regarding Google, including “A Google search has a definite environmental impact” and “Google operates huge data centers around the world that consume a great deal of power”. But the “tea kettle” statistic that has been repeated ad nauseum simply isn’t his.

Just an opinion, but it does sound like someone at the paper dug through all the scientific aspects of the research press release, saw a reference or two to Google and wondered how they could make the headline more exciting. What would the average Brit relate to? Hmmm. Ah, Tea.

You can imagine the conversation, “Let’s work out how many cups of tea you could make using the same energy as a Google search!”

So, it’s all a load of nonsense. Google are not doing any evil. After all, they are the guys who patented the wave powered server farm back in 2007.