I was sort of hoping it would be an explanation of why they thought it was a good idea to have the Send button in one spot for new messages and in another when you reply. Double tricky bonus points for putting the Spam button in the same place as the send button when it moves!

My overclocked I7 downstairs is also using a power supply that claims to be 90%+ efficient, and blows out enough hot air to warm the room. But this is from the processor, not the PSU. It would not make any sense to say that the entire computer is 90% efficient unless we were rating it as a space heater, in which case I'd feel safe claiming 99%+.

I don't even know what it would mean to say that a given server is X% efficient. A percentage of what?

One of the videos has a person explaining about optimizing power distribution in data centers and she specifically mentions using AC/DC converters of 90%+ efficiency.

I am impressed.

and after ten seconds of open mouthed astonishment, my metric brain realizes they are probably talking about Fahrenheit

> That means we don’t need as much energy-intensive air-conditioning, and our employees get to wear shorts to work.

As someone who is in warm datacenters often, "get to" is a bit of a positive spin on it...

>One way we save energy is by keeping the temperature on our server floors at a warm 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Either that or I'm seeing a different one.

Any resident Googlers out here: Who works on such projects? Is it a 20% project? Or there is some dedicated team to do stuff like this?

Edit: Downvotes? Really?

http://www.b-reel.com/

There's a point in there about the relative maturity of graphics code, but let's keep things honest (also, I think the Mac/Windows divide on Flash would be lessened if everyone had to use Flash on the other platform for a while. Imagine your CPU doing that on virtually every page that decides to embed a Flash ad and you'll get some idea of what it's like on a Mac).

Of course, Flash on Linux is even worse than on Windows.

It's also possible that you find gmail awesome because you're comparing it to an in-house system. I'm not. I'm comparing it to Asana, Quora, StackOverflow, or even other some GOOG products. In my world Gmail lines up with JIRA more often than with the tools whose performance consistently delight me.

Maybe it's the JS? Gmail is very code heavy and my laptop sometimes can't keep up.

The only thing that particularly confused me was this line:

> We also custom-build all of our servers so they are 93% efficient.

How do you measure overall efficiency of a server as a percentage, rather than some kind of compute-per-watt metric? I assume it's not 93% of the theoretically optimal electron->computron conversion factor. ;-) The only thing I can guess is that it's the average efficiency of the power supplies?

Googling suggests the most efficient server power power supplies available do indeed have average efficiencies of around 93% (e.g. http://goo.gl/R1HqV ), so yup, that seems likely.

          <div class="overlayContentWrapper video displayNone" data-id="1" data-url="lJnlgM1yEU0">
            <h5>
              Title 2
            </h5>
            <div class="overlayViewWrapper"></div>
            <p>
              Chupa chups caramels tart carrot cake gum bears bear claw. Topping powder chocolate
              bar dragée. Tootsie roll tart lollipop pastry pi donut faworki danish. Jelly beans
              pudding jujubes bear claw jello marshmallow marzipan. Icing powder jelly beans. Pie
              sweetly rolling topping donut ice cream sweet roll cake a cheesecake. Candy chocolate
              cake gummies powder pudding pie sweet.
            </p>
          </div>

Guess they forgot to put a "please enable JS to view this" message in.

But it looks nice! I haven't watched it entirely yet, though.

Really? That seems like a heck of a lot for just 100 searches. I guess this must be including all the googlebot etc. consumption as well.

The green washing aspects would be carbon offsets and such because those are still up for debate as to whether they really have any positive net effect.

Edit: Got a downvote so I thought I'd clarify. Carbon offsets are the act of paying for carbon neutrality. No matter how efficient or environmentally friendly Google is, they can't possibly be carbon neutral with all their energy use unless they use primarily nuclear power with some hydro, solar and wind built in. Therefore they buy carbon offsets, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset, which allow them to advertise that they're carbon neutral. The controversy over them stems from the fact that they're very similar to indulgences from the catholic church in the time of Martin Luther; paying for greenness isn't actually being green.

I saw a talk recently about how much solar and wind power Google buys, and it's not at all cost effective. Google does it because they think it's cool, not because it saves them money. (But, the rate of return on the investment into wind infrastructure tends to be pretty good; wind power can be sold at a higher price than regular power.)

As an example, look at the Googleplex in Maps some time; all the parking spaces are covered with solar cells to charge the specially-converted fleet of plug-in-hybrids available for employees to borrow during the day. Building solar cells and custom-modding cars to give to employees for free is not exactly "saving them a lot of money". But it sure is cool.

I have a personal bias to get over which is that I only believe in investing in energy solutions that can solve large percentages of the energy gap for everyone and not just the ones able to spend the money or work the incentives system.