Two Google searches produce the same amount of CO2 as bringing water to a boil on your stove top, according to research from Harvard University. Google claims that the Harvard study is flawed. The Harvard study was first published in British newspaper The Sunday Times.

According to the report just carrying out a typical search through Google can generate about 7 grams of carbon dioxide. Alex Wissner-Gross, the Harvard University professor that authored the report, says that even just browsing a basic Website can generate about 0.002g of CO2 for every second it is viewed. Sites with complex video can bring even more CO2 in the atmosphere, somewhere around 0.2g per second.

But Google doesn’t seem to be happy with the negative publicity the latest Harvard research brings. Only hours after the initial publishing, Google posted on their official blog an article explaining how they “have designed and built the most energy efficient data centers in the world,” calling Dr. Wissner-Gross’s research numbers “many times too high.” Google also says that driving a car for a kilometer (0.6 miles) equates to the same amount of CO2 produced by a thousand of your Google searches.

So is Googling bad for the environment or not? Well, Google definitely has an impact over the environment, due the large amounts of energy it uses in its data centers around the world. But as Google points out, in comparison to other industries (such as the automobile), the effects it has over the environment are comparably lower. The only thing left to see is how good to the planet Google will be as years go by and even more people gain access to the Internet.

Microsoft issued its first patch for the just-released Windows 7 beta, but it passed on plugging a hole in an important file-sharing protocol that it fixed in older versions of the operating system.

Yesterday, Windows Update, Microsoft’s primary update service, began delivering the first patch to Windows 7 since the company struggled to launch the public beta last Friday. The update fixes a flaw that shaves several seconds of audio from any MP3 file that’s edited, including files modified automatically as users connect to the Internet.

“Without action on your part, all MP3 files that have large headers in your Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center libraries are likely to lose some audio,” Microsoft said in the support document it published Saturday, several days after it first posted the fix to its MSND and TechNet subscription services.

Before today, users who wanted to apply the fix had to find it, download it manually and install it themselves.

Microsoft also recommended that users back up all MP3 files before doing an upgrade to Windows 7 from Windows Vista, and that they set all of them to “read-only” status by right-clicking each file in Windows Explorer and then clicking the General tab and selecting the “Read-only” box. Failing that, users should disable metadata automatic updates in Windows Media Player, Microsoft said.