It all started when an article in the London Times took a few liberties with the work of Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard physics professor who had done research on the amount of energy used by search engines. The Times article stated that according to professor Wissner-Gross, a Google query created roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling kettle.

Wissner-Gross immediately shot back that he made no such claim but had instead simply found that visiting a website creates an average of 20 milligrams of carbon dioxide per second.

But the damage had been done and the “Google Query Debate” had begun across the blogosphere. This quickly prompted a reaction from Google, whose co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have backed numerous environmental initiatives.

Google pointed out that each search took their computers only 0.2 seconds to execute and that the servers that do the most work are only active for what amounts to hundredths of a second per search. They also identified that a person’s computer itself is using more energy in the time it takes to run a search than it does for Google to complete it on their end.