what ARE they searching for?

One of most popular search phrases people who visit our site use is "all recycled stuff."

Which got us to thinking, when someone types that into a search engine, what exactly are they hoping to find? Well, we tried it, and here's what we found:

Where does all the recycled stuff go? from WikiAnswers

Space Baby Beebo sculpture – recycled stuff from Earth Stream

Jewellery made from recycled stuff from How Can I Recycle This?

holiday crafts: Halloween (recycled stuff) from Fun In The Making

Awesome Things to Make with Recycled Stuff from Amazon.com

Recycled "stuff" this year from Flickr

And, of course, our very own footprint: all natural green eco recycled stuff. Aha...we used it right there in the title ;)

Note: the image at top was the first to come up when we searched "all recycled stuff" in Bing. Now that is strange.

i search, therefore i'm green

"A single Google query consumes as much energy as an 11-watt light bulb does in one hour."

This according to the home page for Znout, an free Google-based search site. Znout says their search engine turns your "web searches into green web searches," by measuring the energy consumption of their servers, plus emissions from the network infrastructure, plus the energy consumption of your own computer.

Then they purchase renewable energy certificates (similar to carbon credits) to balance out the environmental footprint caused by searching. Apparently, this in itself makes your searches "eco-friendly."

Forestle - another "green search engine" based with Yahoo - donates all profits to the "Adopt an Acre" program of The Nature Conservancy, which uses this money for the sustainable protection of rainforests.

Sounds simple. But, like the debate over carbon offsetting (why are we not trying to reduce emissions instead?), it's not.

Both sites bear the logo "Green Certified Site" - a product of C02 stats, which charges between $10-100 a month in exchange for a logo that says your site is "carbon neutral and energy-efficient."

But hey, what's Google doing about the environment anyway? Search away! Ecocho | Blackle | EcoSeek

a web of pollution?

Metro News reports on an unreleased study that links web use and global warming.

Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross studied the environmental impact of internet use, and found that about 20 milligrams of CO2 are released into the atmosphere for every second that an average website is viewed. That includes the energy used both on the surfer and hoster's end.

“At an individual surfer scale, the impact is not that large — about 50 per cent larger than a human exhaling,” Wissner-Gross said recently. “But in aggregate, for websites that get a lot of traffic, it can be substantial and it can be thousands of pounds of CO2 per month.”

His report has generated a lot of talk, most notably from Google after a British newspaper singled out the search engine giant as a key offender, mainly because it directs individuals to multiple servers simultaneously to generate speedier responses.

Google responded with the claim that it would take more than 1,000 queries on its search engine to equal the greenhouse gas emissions generated by an average car driving one kilometre.

Sounds innocent enough...but judging by the number of Google searches (according to Search Engine Watch), that's 91,000 kilometres a day!

Editors note: Thanks to Jimmy Guy for passing this along.

Saving Energy One Search at a Time

In January 2007, a blog post titled 'Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year' proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine ("a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002). Enter Blackle.

Created by Heap Media, Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search. Whether or not the energy savings are significant, they believe there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Plus, seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser should remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy.