5 Ways to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint When Using Search Engines
Reducing energy consumption and protecting your privacy
Search engines are an essential part of our daily lives, but did you know that their use can also have a significant impact on the environment? Here are five ways to reduce your carbon footprint when using search engines.
Search engines have substantial servers that store text, keywords, URLs, links between pages on a website, images, etc. The goal is to provide relevant results as quickly as possible. To do this, search engines index the web.
Indexing is based on the same principle as a cookbook. The recipes represent web pages, sites, etc. The index at the end of the book lists products/ingredients with the corresponding page numbers to find them easily. So, you can think of Google in this way (even though its algorithms are much more complex).
Now, imagine the size of the Web's index, with all the sites that make it up: blogs, news sites, YouTube videos... the amount of data is astronomical.
Every day, Google's robots travel the Web to update this index. And every day, billions of people conduct searches on Google. For each of these queries, the system must search through this mass of information to be able to propose 1,000,000,000 relevant results.
In addition, Google is trying to be faster by using prediction algorithms for your searches: what we call search suggestions.
This represents a significant energy cost, even if it is difficult to quantify. Of course, Google's engineers are not going to keep us informed about the amount of energy needed to provide such a service. I'm not even sure they are able to determine it, due to the importance of its volume.
In these conditions, every action counts. I strongly recommend that you:
- bookmark all the sites you regularly visit (at least once a month).
- enter the URL of the site you want to visit directly in the address bar. For example: les-enovateurs.com
At first glance, these habits may seem trivial. However, applied on a scale of all search engine users, they will allow for significant energy savings. With these small actions, you will reduce your carbon footprint AND you will no longer enrich Google with your personal data. Yes, because for each Google search, you generate targeted advertising based on your previous searches.
Did you know these tricks? Do you have other solutions to reduce your carbon footprint related to search engines?
