Google has reportedly admitted that a single Google
search engine query uses 1,000 servers in 0.2 seconds.
The admission by
Google fellow Jeff
Dean, in a keynote session at
WSDM 2009, may alarm
those campaigning for
greener datacentres.
According to Jeff Dean, while both search queries and processing
power have gone up by a factor of 1,000 over ten years, latency has
gone down from around 1000ms to 200ms.
Another significant change, said Dean, has been holding the
complete search index in memory. This has resulted in 1,000
machines being used to handle a single query, compared to just 12
previously.
This revelation may be embarrassing for Google, which
has defended its ecological record in the past, claiming a
single Google query takes just 0.0003KWh of energy and that its
datacentres are the world's most efficient.
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