Y Combinator Firm CO2Stats Caught in Frenzy of Environmental Cost of Google Search

I'm not sure that's true. I mean, in many businesses it's true that any publicity is good publicity. But when your business is dependant on you being an authoritative source bad publicity has a real impact. What's the point of a site that reports CO2 stats if the guy has proven he can't be trusted to give accurate stats?

(The link says he claims not to have been the source for the article just for the record)

You're probably right in this instance. His startup was so small before and the fallout is so big that he may very well get more new visitors than he loses this time around. But I'll be curious to see if they make return trips or whether they assume he can't be trusted and go on their way.

For commercial online enterprises, "raising awareness" is a euphemism for "getting signups."

Although I think Alex is, at heart, genuinely interested in helping the environment (he has a PhD in environmental science and is an environmental fellow at Harvard, after all). The fact that he has found a way to monetize his interest and help the environment at the same time is great. And it appears to be very profitable as well.

I think in many minds this will be summarized as:

  * CO2stats said google uses X
  * Google said they use Y, which is far less than X

Not very repeatable getting the Times to troll Google unless you get a PR company to feed them the flamebait nonsense and then give a quote to go with it. I suspect CO2stats has just been lucky. I'm sure this will be good publicity for them if they keep handling it as well as they have.