Tbh, this is far too complex to just look at bandwidth... On your side, not only is it more bandwidth, but it's more CPU time on their servers, granted I'm sur

Tbh, this is far too complex to just look at bandwidth... On your side, not only is it more bandwidth, but it's more CPU time on their servers, granted I'm sure the shorter the search is, the more the raw search data is cached (not a static output cache, so it still is customizable on-the-fly). On the other hand, the amount of time spent searching on the Google scale is so much less that it could honestly end up saving energy. 350 million hours of user time per year saved is a VERY impressive projection, that could mitigate the costs pretty significantly, especially for users who refine searches multiple times anyway.