How much the cost of a web search? You do not pay in advance, but what is clear is there is the cost, and not just measured in dollars, writes James Clarage, a physicist from the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, United States, in the 4th edition of New Scientist magazine last April.

The term of “machine” search is fit. Searching powered by millions of computers are packed into a warehouse, all bound to one another to function as a single system.

Like other systems, single system that ignores the laws of thermodynamics and therefore wasting energy.

The first law states that a single system utilizing the energy to work, even though the work was just moving electrons across the silicon introduction.

The second law says that no machine is perfect, this means that some input is lost as heat. This is the entropy, or disorder, which arises from the searches you do.

Search results pages that managed to bring clarity and order to the corner of your universe, but it fell into the fields of servers can be messy things.

Thermal motion of air molecules shaking the silicon atoms in the rear shelf CPU, heat the molecules.

More energy must be entered into the computer power and cooling needed to remove hot air from the warehouse.

Whatever you are looking for, will experience the same cycle; move the atoms, then cooled atoms.

Both these steps require energy. How much? Let’s run through some numbers, using the famous search engine as our guide. Whatever you are looking for, will experience the same cycle; move, then cool the atoms.

The Gartner IT research firm estimates that Google’s data centers consist of nearly a million servers, each describing about 1 kilowatt of electricity.

So every hour of the Google engine to burn up to 1 million kilowatts per hour. Google to serve up to approximately 10 million search results per hour. So one has the burden of searching the same energy as when switch 100 watt light bulb for one hour.

This is not a good sign. Although the average American to do 1.5 searches per day, it’s hard to imagine this has not increased dramatically.

United States Environmental Protection Office estimates that data centers were responsible for 1.5 percent of energy used by the U.S..

How much more when we, and our device, conducted hundreds of searches per day? Or when all of the 6 billion inhabitants of this planet wants equal access? We’ve all heard the future of information architecture was so computerized. That might just cover the carbon dioxide.

Translate and rewrite by Syadiash

(Indonesian Version by Kompas News: New Scientist/Henny Ratnasari/AR09 : Rahasia Kotor “Search Engine”)

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