# Is Google destroying the planet?

> In Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that she’s “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. Well, it’s a good thing I read this post about the environmental impact of Google searches before…
> URL: https://www.smartdatacollective.com/15765/
> Last modified: 2009-01-11T16:55:07+00:00

In Lewis Caroll’s [*Through the Looking Glass*](http://www.sabian.org/Alice/lgchap05.htm), the White Queen tells Alice that she’s “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. Well, it’s a good thing I read this post about the [environmental impact of Google searches](http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece) before breakfast. It cites physicist [Alex Wissner-Gross](http://www.alexwg.org/) as saying that the average Google search generates 7g of CO2, using up half as much energy as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.

I ate some breakfast after reading it, and now I’m feeling appropriately skeptical again. If nothing else, I doubt Google reveals enough about its internals for anyone to come to such a precise calculation.

Nonetheless, there may be something worth exploring in this argument. Even if the environmental cost of Google is far less than this research claims, it’s still a cost. Perhaps we should think about information seeking systems not only in terms of efficient use of human attention, but also in terms of other non-renewable natural resources.

		
							
					
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In the automobile industry, we (at least in the United States) made the mistake of assuming the customer was always right, thus favoring SUVs over more economical and energy-efficient alternatives. Hopefully we’ve learned our lesson, though that’s still to be determined. In any case, perhaps there’s a similar lesson to be learned in the world of search engines.

			
				
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