A study on query energy consumption in web search engines

Commercial web search engines are usually deployed on data centers, which leverage thousands of servers to eficiently answer queries on a large scale. Thanks to these distributed infrastructures, search engines can quickly serve high query volumes. However, the energy consumed by these many servers poses economical and environmental challenges for the Web search engine companies. To tackle such challenges, we advocate the importance of quantifying the energy consumption of a search engine. Therefore, in this study we experimentally analyze energy consumption on a per query basis. Our aim is to evaluate how much energy is consumed by a search server to answer a single query, i.e, its query energy consumption. To perform such measurements, experiments are conducted using the TREC ClueWeb09 collection and the MSN 2006 query log. Results suggest that solving queries require an amount of energy directly proportional to the query processing time.