Technology History | The Dalles — The Search Index Moved to the Columbia River

The Dalles had cheap electricity long before it had Google.

The dam across the Columbia went into operation in 1957, and the power behind it drew Harvey Aluminum, whose smelter opened on the riverbank the following year and ran for decades.

Google took the smelter's ground. The data centre it opened here in 2006 was the first the company built for itself rather than leased, and it came for what the aluminium industry had come for: hydroelectricity and a river.

Fibre-optic trunk lines running the length of the Columbia corridor supplied the third thing a search index needs.

The bargain was the familiar one. The city agreed to long-term tax relief, and in return got an anchor employer to replace the one it had lost.

What it also got was a neighbour with a large and undisclosed appetite for water, because the cooling towers on the flank of these buildings work by evaporating it.

For years Google treated the volume as a trade secret. When a reporter for The Oregonian requested the figures under Oregon's public records law and the Wasco County district attorney ruled the refusal invalid, the city sued the newspaper rather than release them.

The case ran thirteen months.

It ended in December 2022, when the city settled and handed over the records, and Google dropped the trade-secret claim on site-level water use at all of its data centres.

The numbers: 274.5 million gallons in 2021, and more than a quarter of all the water used in the city.

The buildings are fenced and closed to visitors, but they are plainly visible from the roads above the industrial flat, low and pale against the brown hills of the Gorge.

The photograph shows the cooling towers rather than any office, which is what a search engine looks like at scale.

Sources: Associated Press and The Oregonian reporting on the 2022 settlement and the released water records; Oregon Encyclopedia; Oregon Public Broadcasting; Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Cover photo: Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.