Search Engines Exposed, Well, Not Exactly
April 8, 2010
What a great link bait title! “Search Engines’ Dirty Secret”. The idea in the story is a bit different from the exposé that the addled goose expected. The New Scientist article tackles the burning issue of the cost of a search. The angle is not the costs divided by the number of searches. Nope. The analysis focuses on the information that “Google’s data centres contain nearly a million servers.” The source? My benchmark azure chip consulting firm, Gartner Group. With some calculations, the physicist author arrives at the conclusion a search “costs” for 10 million search results per hour as the same as turning on a 100 watt light bulb for an hour.
Do you know the cost of turning on a 100 watt light bulb for one hour? I didn’t. Well, there you go.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
No one paid us to write this article. How much does zero cost cost? Hmmm.
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2 Responses to “Search Engines Exposed, Well, Not Exactly”
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One would have to weight the energy cost against the benefits. The benefits to the economy of being able to search via Google are enormous (I’ve never seen them calculated in The Economist, though) and must surely vastly outweigh the piffling energy costs involved.
I still don’t. Have a look at International Comparison of Electricity Prices and notice that residential prices can vary by a multiple of 4 but are always more expensive than industrial rates with maybe one country exception and thats not even working in PPP. Oh and what bulb are you comparisng, compact fluorescent (CFL) or Incandesant light bulb (ILB)? CFL uses about a quarter as much power as the CPL. If that isn’t enough variance, not every search is created equal; see the Sunday Times 2009 article “Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches by Jonathan Leake and Richard Woods. Coloring this treatment is the following:”A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.” So I would ask what percentage of the IT industry is data center and then how much of that is web or cloud as distinct from local or enterprise; finally what percentage of that 2% does Google represent. Last word to Google: “In fact, Google data centers are 50% more energy-efficient than the industry standard” in an official statement to Greenpeace March 30. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/04/05/google-microsoft-respond-to-greenpeace/
If zero costs costs less at Google magnitudes how many fewer zeros will healthcare cost at Goog*Mart