# Google Details, and Defends, Its Use of Electricity



## ekim68 (Jul 8, 2003)

> Google disclosed Thursday that it continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes, but it says that in doing so, it also makes the planet greener.
> 
> Every time a person runs a Google search, watches a YouTube video or sends a message through Gmail, the companys data centers full of computers use electricity. Those data centers around the world continuously draw almost 260 million watts  about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant.


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## JohnAlpha (Jul 11, 2009)

Going along with this, here is the blog post Google made in regard to the energy consumption of its services:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/gmail-its-cooler-in-cloud.html


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## Frank4d (Sep 10, 2006)

I am more concerned about the electricity usage of the 100,000 webhosting computers out there that have bots harvesting tidbits of useless information from every website on the internet. For example, my microwave isn't working today, so I typed my model number into Google, and was presented with 9800 results. About 99% are useless sites offering the manual for download, lists of parts (some not even in my microwave), 3 year old reviews, offers to sell me an extended warranty, lists of old outdated prices, forums offering help (for a price of course), and some sites just showing random junk with the part number for my microwave. It seems no matter what problem you may have Fixya has an answer for it. Huge waste of electricity.


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

Yeah and Google's recent change of their search results order doesn't help any.
I now nearly always have to scroll to the second or third page to find the first real result that isn't spam.
It was once said that porn made up 80% of the web usage, a recent study at Berkley for the US government showed that it is actually about 1% and that Spam makes up 89%. See http://www.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=11781&start=0&sid=46306d4eaed2d6fddce09a843bf63624

By the way, and for those that don't know of it, QI is a television quiz with a big difference. The title stands for Quite Interesting and the point of the show is to be interesting and funny, not necessarily correct. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QI


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