Google's Energy Consumption

This week, I read an article about how Google has recently come out with the secret that they had been keeping for a very long time; how much energy they use.  (Found at http://techland.time.com/2011/09/09/6-things-youd-never-guess-about-googles-energy-use/)  This article stated that 0.013% of the entire world's energy use is used by Google.  It also gave me interesting facts about how much energy that truly is.  For example, the article states that, "Google uses enough energy to continuously power 200,000 homes.

The article was written by Jared Newman, a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, G4, PCWorld.com and Technologizer.com.  He knows all about the new and upcoming technology and has written many other articles on Google.

This Piece was written in a time when Google is one of the biggest companies developing the new technology.  Everyone wonders how much energy it takes for Google to run their searches and support the millions of people who own Gmail accounts.  Not to mention the other cool things that Google can do.  The article was written to show the people how much it really takes to simply search "Yellow Lab Puppies" on a Google image search just to look at the cute pictures of playful puppies.  It did not try to tell us that we should not be using Google because they use too much energy.  The audience that they wrote this for is the ones who use Google, which is pretty much everyone, as far as I know.  The rhetorical elements that are used in this piece are:

1. A use of many different statistics to appeal to logos
• "Google accounts for roughly 0.013 percent of the world's energy use"
2. Little anecdotal examples to appeal to pathos
• "One Google search is equal to turning on a 60W light bulb for 17 seconds"
3. Jared Newman added smaller sentences that don't mean much that added to the persona that he depicted himself as
• "That's hard work!" and "Google's just getting silly with this statistic."

I believe that the author did accomplish his purpose because he effectively intrigued me into reading further on through the article.  Also, at the end, he left me wanting to read more and learn more about the site that I use everyday.  He really put into perspective how much energy it takes to run Google.