

Google Instant - Is it good for environment? - khatarnaak

Yesterday i was searching on Google with firebug ON, and observed instant search consuming more bandwidth than normal search (3-10X).<p>see - http://www.twitpic.com/30o2cv/full<p>I had searched for "google videos", total bandwidth consumed -
- Without Google instant-9k, With Google instant-49k (5 times normal search)<p>Is it good for environment?<p>If more bandwidth is consumed means more resources are consumed which adversely affects the environmental.<p>After Google Instant lot of other websites are implementing the instant versions which can deteriorate the situation further.<p>One more issue, in developing countries bandwidth is very precious, people have to pay lot for low bandwidth.<p>Is the instant search feature good for developing nations (with limited internet resources)?<p>Is the instant search feature good for environment?
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btilly
Your observations are correct, but I wouldn't worry too much about them.

If you're concerned about the environment, I should point out that Google has
a policy of being carbon neutral. Therefore all of the environmental impacts
on Google's side have already been offset.

As for developing countries, <http://www.google.com/instant/> says that Google
autodetects slow connections and turns instant off for them. So the feature
should be a non-issue for them - you only get it if your connection is good
enough for it to be worthwhile for you. (If you have a fast connection but pay
by the megabyte, there is an option to turn it off as well.)

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michaelhart
Tbh, this is far too complex to just look at bandwidth...

On your side, not only is it more bandwidth, but it's more CPU time on their
servers, granted I'm sure the shorter the search is, the more the raw search
data is cached (not a static output cache, so it still is customizable on-the-
fly).

On the other hand, the amount of time spent searching on the Google scale is
so much less that it could honestly end up saving energy. 350 million hours of
user time per year saved is a VERY impressive projection, that could mitigate
the costs pretty significantly, especially for users who refine searches
multiple times anyway.

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coderz
This indeed correct, If you see consumption in terms of KBs they are not
significant 20-100kb, but you see in terms of multiples, 2-4X bandwidth
consumption will be very significant considering Google search having very
higher network consumption world-wide.

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khatarnaak
<http://www.twitpic.com/30o2cv/full>

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croc
That's an interesting observation

