Google Search
Google's web search engine, launched 1997, which handles the large majority of global web queries. Beyond its market role, Google Search is widely used as a baseline unit in digital energy comparisons, with a long-standing per-query estimate of roughly 0.3 Wh used by the IEA, EPRI, and others.
Google Search is the web search engine operated by Google LLC, launched in 1997 and handling the large majority of global web queries — generally estimated at well over 80% market share by the mid-2020s. The service indexes hundreds of billions of web pages and ranks results using a combination of classical link analysis, machine-learned relevance models, and, more recently, generative AI overviews. Beyond its commercial significance, Google Search has become a de facto baseline unit in discussions of digital energy consumption. Google itself published in 2009 that a typical search used roughly 0.3 Wh of energy and emitted about 0.2 grams of CO2, a figure that has been re-used by the International Energy Agency, the Electric Power Research Institute, and academic researchers as a reference point for comparing newer workloads such as large language model queries and blockchain transactions. The 0.3 Wh figure predates major architectural changes — including the rollout of AI Overviews and Gemini-powered features — and Google has indicated that AI-augmented search uses substantially more energy per query, though it has not published a refreshed per-query number. Independent observers therefore treat 0.3 Wh as a historical floor rather than a current measurement, while still using it for order-of-magnitude comparisons.