
How Much Does a Single Search Cost Google? - jackowayed
http://billwarner.posterous.com/new-blog-post-how-much-does-a-single-search-c
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storborg
While these numbers are sort of interesting, they are misleading, because the
1.18 cents/search number that the author provides is not actually the cost of
a single search.

A more useful analysis would be to estimate the _marginal cost_ of each
additional search (e.g. if I go make a search right now, how much extra does
that cost Google?).

Likewise, there is a similar number that represents the marginal cost of each
additional webpage that Google indexes.

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nostrademons
Wouldn't that be zero at most off-peak times? Machines are gonna use
electricity whether you're using them or not.

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pedrocr
Power consumption will vary based on usage on modern machines and Google could
do automatic boot/shutdown of machines to match demand. But the marginal cost
in electricity alone should still be pretty small.

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sandGorgon
but its not about running power - its about cooling costs, which IMHO makes up
the bulk of a data center's expenditure.

I'm not sure if there has been any innovation in this area (shut off power AND
cooling for certain areas in the data center)

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wtallis
There has been a form of innovation - in some server farms that consist of
thousands of interchangeable computers, they simply don't try to cool them,
and instead just exchange air with the outdoors (possibly with a bit of
filtering). If your software doesn't mind having nodes frequently drop out due
to overheating, then it apparently is cheaper to replace melted CPUs than to
keep them all cool.

[http://blogs.technet.com/b/msdatacenters/archive/2011/01/04/...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/msdatacenters/archive/2011/01/04/shedding-
light-on-our-new-cloud-farms.aspx)

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SwellJoe
Which is also why more data centers, including Google data centers, are being
built in cool climates. If you're exchanging for cold outside air, you get to
keep more of your servers from melting down without paying more for cooling.

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corin_
Having read this I searched around for other figures on how many searches
Google serves each month, and while I didn't find any better sources, I did
come across a Google blog entry _[1]_ about the environmental cost of
searches.

It interested me to know that, based on the average MPG of cars in the US
_[2]_ and a rough cost of a gallon of petrol _[3]_ , it would cost 1.6% of a
GBP penny, or 1/40th of a USD cent, to emit the same amount of CO2 in a car as
a single Google search (0.2 grams of CO2 _[1]_ ).

I'm not sure why I felt the above was interesting enough to write in a
comment, but for some reason it does interest me that, if Bill's calculations
are correct, it costs Google 27 times as much per gram of CO2 emitted as it
does drivers (excluding car costs etc.) Even assuming I'm showing signs of
insanity chosing to work that out, the amount of CO2 emitted is good to know.

[1] [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-
searc...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-search.html)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2009_United_States_EPA_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2009_United_States_EPA_fuel_economy_ratings)

[3] <http://www.speedlimit.org.uk/petrolprices.html>

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lukeschlather
>(excluding car costs etc.)

That's a very significant piece of the emissions footprint of a car. I've seen
numbers that say as much as 30% of the emissions resulting from a car come
from the car's construction and distribution.

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Retric
I have seen numbers that suggest it costs about as much to keep our road
system maintained as the fuel costs to drive on it. Basically add up the cost
of bridge / road matience, deicing, DMV, highway police, truck weigh stations,
drivers ed, and new roads and you find our highway system is heavily
subsidized.

~~~
corin_
While it's true that all that costs money and creates CO2, as do the cars
themselves (as lukeschlather commented), I suspect that Google aren't taking
into account the cost and the CO2 of the infrastructure of the internet, that
actually allows people to search through them.

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ahiker
Should we call this estimate: 'cost of Google as measured by searches'?
Similarly, you can divide the cost by number of Google employees and call it
'cost of Google search per employee'?

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perlgeek
The total cost (including revenue from advertising) is negative, otherwise
google wouldn't be profitable.

Anyway, I found his transparency and links to the sources way more interesting
than the actual result (which I somehow still doubt on an intuitive level)

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sayemm
Don Dodge put together some interesting numbers on the search market before in
a post, albeit three years ago:
[http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/why_1...](http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/why_1_of_search.html)

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chanri
What would also be interesting to know is what the average CPM of the Google
Search Engine is, and compare this with Bing or Yahoo.

I would think (but cannot confirm) that Google makes more per search than Bing
or Yahoo.

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dwolchon
I'm sure that's right. There are more eyeballs doing searches on Google, and
there is an auction between advertisers pay to put their ads in front of
users. More advertisers chasing users probably gives them more revenue per
search.

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alphaoverlord
Shouldn't there be some sort of parity?

A user is a user is a user. Unless google users are that much more likely to
buy something after clicking my ad, why would you pay more per individual
view? Sure the absolute numbers should go up with more views, but it doesn't
seem like money well spent to pay more for similar adspace.

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il
Actually, for some industries, Google traffic converts much better than
Bing/Yahoo traffic. No 2 traffic sources are exactly alike.

~~~
josefresco
For years Yahoo! converted 30% better than AdWords on the same keywords for
several of my active CPC clients.

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to
i think the issue here is that a search is one service payed by another
(adwords) and so on. for the cost of a search you have to devide all employees
into their group and take out only the cost for searches. but than comes
adwords and pay for it... tough the adwords code probably runs on the same
servers that deliver searches (unified system)... i guess its really hard to
cslculate but i would guess a search is only a fraction of a cent even before
balancing it out win profits.

