'Climate Friendly' Browsers & Internet Search Companies

Well keeping the internet in RAM would be a pretty good trick. And Google certainly doesn’t do that. What is said is that the sheer numbers of servers they have around the world allows most of the index created by GoogleBot to be kept in RAM buffers. The actual index itself and all the data still resides on disk as is the normal case.

Google claims that it is the world’s largest corporate buyer of power from renewable sources. Some 2.6 GigaWatts demand. That is about what Victoria’s biggest station, Loy Yang A produces at max output.

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How much energy does the WWW (global internet) including all the supporting infrastructure really consume? To be honest we’d need to add in the lifetime cost of building it all. With the average Australian adding 14t CO2e plus who knows how much personal energy per working year, another hidden energy cost. All add to

If we turned Google search off and provided no alternative, would 90% of the global internet usage, the infrastructure, energy consumed and staff employed all disappear?

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Are you talking inclusive or exclusive of crypto-currency mining?

Exclusive of crypto mining as one question.
Considering that until recently the net existed principally to move data/content in one form or another. Directly or indirectly.

The network demands of crypto mining are supposedly minimal. The connectivity needs are modest.

The elephant in the room as you point out:
It’s fact crypto mining is a massive consumer of energy for it’s own ends. One site suggests the dedicated mining computers and the data centres dedicated to mining in 2020 were consuming globally 120GW every second of the day.

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Crypto-mining relies on the Internet. I would say that the mining itself occurs on the Internet’s ‘supporting infrastructure’.

Come on now @postulative and @mark_m. Bitcoin mining is purely “number crunching”. No network involved, apart from communicating with others in the bitcoin universe as to your success or otherwise in solving a puzzle.

Nothing to do with this topic. It would be good to stay on topic.

And as an aside, I have a fundamental definitional problem with those who think the WWW is the Internet. No it is not. It it is one of many application protocols that can run across TCP/IP networking infrastructure.

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Some would disagree with that

The Bitcoin Network is critical to the mining of the Coins, and the ‘mining computers’ on the network are crucial to the verification of any transaction. Thus the internet is part of that structure.

You are certainly correct in that Bitcoin mining is not about search engines or their Climate Friendly Bona Fides.

I think if you asked most people what the Internet was they would respond with something about the World Wide Web (the Web) being the Internet these days. Language changes and common usage definitions do as well.

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… why limit it to TCP?

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Ok, I could add UDP, the other Internet transport protocol.
Would you like to suggest any other that HTTP might use?

Oh dear. Let’s forget such basics as email (SMTP/POP), and all the behind-the-scenes services such as DNS and NNTP servers to mention just a few.

Some people view Facebook as ‘the Internet’ - but the fact that they hold this opinion does not make it any more correct than believing that the WWW is ‘all’.

Why limit ‘the Internet’ to the HTTP/S transport layer?

And let us not forget the local network Token Ring (which more properly should have been called pass the parcel).

HTTP is one of the applications on the Internet. It is not a “transport layer”.
And Token Ring? What about it?
Long gone out of use when Ethernet became dominant.

If there is any further interest one could follow these links.
HTTP, a protocol and not hardware.

The following are standards relating to communications hardware.
Token ring, IEEE 802.5
Ethernet, IEEE 802.3

For the average home internet user, none of this is relevant to the choice of browser. One plugs the ethernet cable in or connects over WiFi, checks that for important things there is a https protocol displayed at the start of the address bar, and all is good.

Don’t forget the firewall, AV, adblocker, VPN, and external backup software.

  • plus the third thing: responding to queries

Regardless, the energy consumed would no longer be attributable to Google.

Not forgetting them at all, it is just if you ask most people in the Street what the Internet is most would describe the Web in some way or another. The things like telnet, RIP, UDP, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, DNS, DHCP, FTP are only discussed as issues when people can’t get connected to the Web or stream the movie or get their emails, can’t get to Facebook and so on. Often it revolves around how do I set up my router, what are ports, how do I use VPN, and so on but in the end they just want to use the “Web” or “Internet” as it is often synonmously called.

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Would any of you folks like another topic, suggested title of ‘The Internet: its underbelly, protocols, speeds, feeds and standards’? and/or ‘Networking Programmer Tutorial’? It might be broad enough to capture most of the current discussion - or maybe not.

I suffer to imagine the consumer aspects of most of it, but that could just be me.

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Not me @PhilT. All the interesting things on the Internet are the applications. What goes on underneath is for the most part long ago architected and frankly boring.

Sounds like a crime drama. Absolutely NO!
I already know how it is going to end.

Many thanks for the thought. :wink:

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