
Google Green - The Story of Send - mayanksinghal
http://www.google.com/green/storyofsend
======
nkurz
Beautiful animation, which almost perfectly reflects Google's transformation
from a engineering-driven tech company with a flair for beautiful solutions to
a advertising-driven "ideas" company with a penchant for meaningless
marketspeak. Wow, their servers are 93% efficient!

I was sort of hoping it would be an explanation of why they thought it was a
good idea to have the Send button in one spot for new messages and in another
when you reply. Double tricky bonus points for putting the Spam button in the
same place as the send button when it moves!

~~~
ubercore
It's not at all marketspeak:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_supply_unit_(computer)#Ef...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_supply_unit_\(computer\)#Efficiency)

~~~
nkurz
Upvoted because I appreciate pedantic responses, but I'm familiar with PSU
efficiency standards. I still feel confident saying it is nonsense to say that
"We also custom-build all of our servers so they are 93% efficient" and would
bet that this was written by a non-technical marketing person.

My overclocked I7 downstairs is also using a power supply that claims to be
90%+ efficient, and blows out enough hot air to warm the room. But this is
from the processor, not the PSU. It would not make any sense to say that the
entire computer is 90% efficient unless we were rating it as a space heater,
in which case I'd feel safe claiming 99%+.

I don't even know what it would mean to say that a given server is X%
efficient. A percentage of what?

~~~
entropy_
Actually, I think this is a case of an engineer saying something that is later
taken out of context and used by a marketing person.

One of the videos has a person explaining about optimizing power distribution
in data centers and she specifically mentions using AC/DC converters of 90%+
efficiency.

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vnorby
Push your back and forward buttons on your browser in the middle of one of the
animations. That is seriously cool.

~~~
masklinn
And it even works correctly in Firefox 3.6 (actually Camino), including
sounds.

I am impressed.

------
riffraff
> the temperature on our server floors at a warm 80 degrees

and after ten seconds of open mouthed astonishment, my metric brain realizes
they are probably talking about Fahrenheit

~~~
furyg3
Also:

> That means we don’t need as much energy-intensive air-conditioning, and our
> employees get to wear shorts to work.

As someone who is in warm datacenters often, "get to" is a bit of a positive
spin on it...

------
Eduard
On the way to the last information spot, your Google Mail goes through an
undisclosed rack. This rack symbolizes the new NSA data spy center in Utah.

~~~
pirateking
That quick stop caught my attention too. I'm thinking the same as you as to
what it symbolizes. If so, happy to see it was at least represented on the
tour.

------
dm8
Insanely cool!

Any resident Googlers out here: Who works on such projects? Is it a 20%
project? Or there is some dedicated team to do stuff like this?

Edit: Downvotes? Really?

~~~
mattupstate
It was done in part by an agency called B-Reel. They do quite a bit of work
with Google.

<http://www.b-reel.com/>

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dude_abides
After watching this video, can anyone still justify the existence of Adobe
Flash in this world?

~~~
dugmartin
Yes - this demo pegged my 4 core cpu on Chrome/Windows 64.

~~~
magicalist
That seems unlikely. For an accelerated tab you'll have the Tab process, the
GPU process, and the Browser process. Even if you pegged all three (which is
extremely unlikely considering the content), you'd still have a core to spare.

There's a point in there about the relative maturity of graphics code, but
let's keep things honest (also, I think the Mac/Windows divide on Flash would
be lessened if everyone had to use Flash on the other platform for a while.
Imagine your CPU doing that on virtually every page that decides to embed a
Flash ad and you'll get some idea of what it's like on a Mac).

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mrtron
How was this made? The browser scrollbar is even perfectly useable.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Very well, that’s how. A quick look reveals that each scene is a section, the
assets are linked with data attributes, and the rest is fancy combinations of
TweenJS and Three.js animations, coordinated by /assets/js/main.min.js (which
also handles the invisible history).

~~~
thisisblurry
It also appears that Swiffy, the SWF-to-HTML converter
(<http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/>) was used for helping to
generate some of those animations.

------
famousactress
I can't decide whether this is in explanation or apology for the fact that
gmail is _crazy_ slow.

~~~
VikingCoder
My GMail is consistently faster than my corporate Outlook, on the LAN, in a
company with ~200 employees. This has been true of every company I've worked
at.

~~~
famousactress
I don't currently have Outlook/Exchange. I suppose if I did it's possible that
gmail would seem much nicer to me than it currently does.

------
_delirium
Not too detailed, but a nice overview that I think succeeds in having some
information while being engaging.

The only thing that particularly confused me was this line:

> We also custom-build all of our servers so they are 93% efficient.

How do you measure overall efficiency of a server as a percentage, rather than
some kind of compute-per-watt metric? I assume it's not 93% of the
theoretically optimal electron->computron conversion factor. ;-) The only
thing I can guess is that it's the average efficiency of the power supplies?

~~~
SEMW
> The only thing I can guess is that it's the average efficiency of the power
> supplies?

Googling suggests the most efficient server power power supplies available do
indeed have average efficiencies of around 93% (e.g. <http://goo.gl/R1HqV> ),
so yup, that seems likely.

------
rurounijones
Can anyone explain the following in the code?

    
    
              <div class="overlayContentWrapper video displayNone" data-id="1" data-url="lJnlgM1yEU0">
                <h5>
                  Title 2
                </h5>
                <div class="overlayViewWrapper"></div>
                <p>
                  Chupa chups caramels tart carrot cake gum bears bear claw. Topping powder chocolate
                  bar dragée. Tootsie roll tart lollipop pastry pi donut faworki danish. Jelly beans
                  pudding jujubes bear claw jello marshmallow marzipan. Icing powder jelly beans. Pie
                  sweetly rolling topping donut ice cream sweet roll cake a cheesecake. Candy chocolate
                  cake gummies powder pudding pie sweet.
                </p>
              </div>
    

Some sort of placeholder used to size elementS?

~~~
eevilspock
Probably a list of future Android version names :)

------
tripzilch
Oh wow, a blank white screen. Took me a while to figure out what's going on,
but I disabled Javascript for google.com (makes their search result pages _so_
much less annoying).

Guess they forgot to put a "please enable JS to view this" message in.

But it looks nice! I haven't watched it entirely yet, though.

------
nanijoe
The data you send through google spends very little time touching their own
equipment, so the energy efficiency is of little , if any impact unless it can
be spread to a majority of the providers whose equipment my data touches on
its was to and from google.. A quick traceroute shows me that there ar 10
router hops in between my Laptop and www.gmail.com. If all the 10 devices are
not 'green' , then what net impact does Google's data center being 'green'
have?

~~~
Drbble
Transmission is a small fraction of the work that goes into your email
experience.

------
mkopinsky
_100 Searches = 1 hour of a laptop_

Really? That seems like a heck of a lot for just 100 searches. I guess this
must be including all the googlebot etc. consumption as well.

~~~
hsuresh
Yup, that caught my attention too. And i think it puts things in perspective -
Google search is a really really complex system. The fact that 1 year of Gmail
usage roughly translates to about only 6% power usage as 100 searches is
insane.

------
AndreasFrom
My first thought was green washing, but I do not know enough about Google to
judge. Are they really this environmentally aware?

~~~
ScotterC
As mentioned, they are relentlessly green because they're in a wonderful
situation where it saves them a lot of money.

The green washing aspects would be carbon offsets and such because those are
still up for debate as to whether they really have any positive net effect.

Edit: Got a downvote so I thought I'd clarify. Carbon offsets are the act of
paying for carbon neutrality. No matter how efficient or environmentally
friendly Google is, they can't possibly be carbon neutral with all their
energy use unless they use primarily nuclear power with some hydro, solar and
wind built in. Therefore they buy carbon offsets,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset>, which allow them to advertise
that they're carbon neutral. The controversy over them stems from the fact
that they're very similar to indulgences from the catholic church in the time
of Martin Luther; paying for greenness isn't actually being green.

~~~
jrockway
Google picks offsetting projects that are more valuable than average; details
are here:
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/green/pdfs/google-
carbon-offsets.pdf)

I saw a talk recently about how much solar and wind power Google buys, and
it's not at all cost effective. Google does it because they think it's cool,
not because it saves them money. (But, the rate of return on the investment
into wind infrastructure tends to be pretty good; wind power can be sold at a
higher price than regular power.)

As an example, look at the Googleplex in Maps some time; all the parking
spaces are covered with solar cells to charge the specially-converted fleet of
plug-in-hybrids available for employees to borrow during the day. Building
solar cells and custom-modding cars to give to employees for free is not
exactly "saving them a lot of money". But it sure is cool.

~~~
Drbble
Google is one of the top few investors in solar/wind power generation projects
in the US, not just buying watts, and it is for profit/savings, not a
donation.

~~~
jrockway
Could you explain your calculations on that? How is building new
infrastructure with brand new technology cheaper than plugging into the
existing infrastructure?

------
inportb
In Chromium on my netbook, I could not figure out how to view this awesome
thing that everyone's talking about. It looks like the page is supposed to
scroll down, but I could not do it for lack of a vertical scrollbar. The
horizontal scrollbar doesn't reveal anything useful.

~~~
enobrev
Click the "Start The Story" button (if you see it). It animates through a
scene in a side-scrolling manner, but there's no manual scrolling.

~~~
inportb
Thanks. I saw that button after scaling the page down a couple of steps.
Really amazing stuff.

------
redstripe
If google was truly sincere about going green then it wouldn't be so
protective of it's data centre energy efficiency innovations. It's great that
they're doing lots of work to benefit themselves - but don't try to spin it
like it's done out of concern for the environment.

~~~
slewis
They did help start this: <http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/about>

------
mlf
Although the page and everything on it are beautiful, I can't help but think
that this kind of portrayal perpetuates the "series of tubes" myth about how
the internet functions.

------
nollidge
Looks totally messed up in Safari for Windows. I just started using it, is
that typical of WinSafari with newfangled HTML5 type stuff?

------
AVTizzle
This is absolutely delightful. Interacting with this graphic practically
tickled.

