Google, who have been recently claiming to make moves towards an ecologically friendly future, had some potentially embarrassing news about their infrastructure made public.
In a keynote, Jeff Dean revealed that in the past decade queries and the computing power to process such has increased by a factor of 1000.
An infrastructure change which allowed Google's systems to hold an entire search index in memory utilizes 1000 machines to do so. Previously, without such change only 12 systems were utilized for a single query.
Though a large number of systems, and as such, a seemingly large amount of power consumption, Google stands by it's position that it's datacenters are the most efficient in the world. Google revealed in January of this year that a search uses the same amount of energy that the human body will burn in 10 seconds; 0.0003 kWh.
The question at this moment is whether or not power-efficiency justifies such an 'en masse' use of such systems.
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