Google Search Engine Emmisions in the News

CO2 emissions has been in the news recently when controversy hit over an article published by the London Times on Jan. 11, 2009. According to the article, a single search on Google pumps 7grams of the deadly chemical into the air. Two searches on Google is almost equivalent to boiling water for a cup of tea. They published that they got this staggering number from an interview with Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, owner of the website CO2stats.com, who is a specialist in the carbon footprints of websites.

The controversy grew when Google said the claim was false, and that a search with them only emits 0.2grams of CO2. Even Alex Wissner-Gross says he was misquoted, saying “We didn’t pick [Google]. This was widely misreported. Our work is about Web sites in general, not one Web site in particular. For some reason, in their story on the study, the Times had an ax to grind with Google. I have no idea where they got those [boiling tea water] statistics.”

Whichever side of the story you want to believe, even 0.2grams of CO2 adds up fast when you take into account the tens of millions of searches done every day on any of the major search engines. The good news is that there are “green” options.

Google is considered to be one of the most green sites around. In 2008 they invested $45million into clean energy technologies and started up the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative to research green energy. But there are a couple of other search engines that do their part by donating to charities. As blogger John from Indiana says, “Either continue to use a search engine that (regardless of whether or not the contribution is significant) does release carbon, or use a similar search engine AND help contribute to improving our state of existence on this planet.”

Goodsearch is a search engine run by Yahoo! Right from the bat, before you even begin your search, you get to chose a charity for donations to go to. Goodsearch give 50% of all it’s profits to charities. Their subsite, Goodshop, gives 37% of all it’s profits from sales to charity as well.

There is also GoodTree, who also lets you pick a charity to get a portion of the 12.5% of their profits that they donate to charitable causes.

So while clicking around the web can actually have a negative impact on the environment, at least you can be helping charities out in the process.