Balancing Environmental Sustainability and User Experience: Preliminary Insights from Green Search Engines

The need to reduce the environmental impact has led IT providers to reconsider how physical resources are managed and assigned to different applications. However, application developers play a relevant role and should design their applications in a context-aware way to adapt to the availability of renewable energy. This generates a trade-off between environmental impact and user experience. In this work, we explore this trade-off in the context of search engines. To this end, we conducted an interview-based study to understand the impact of sustainability awareness and other factors on the final users' choices.