Single Google search uses 1,000 servers

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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-Ken