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About three months ago, Ask joined a tree-planting program created by Dell to offset carbon emissions.  Those trees are presumably doing just fine.  The bigger piece of news relates to energy-efficient servers the two companies discussed, and those are also on track.

Ask, Dell Continue Energy-Saving Efforts

Granted, there’s no reason to have thought that Dell and Ask wouldn’t deliver, but environmental interests could easily have been set aside in pursuit of more acquisitions or a bigger share of the search market.  Look at the $100 laptop if you need an example of good intentions going awry.

So when Patrick Thibodeau reports that the new servers, made by Dell for Ask, use 30 percent less power than the old ones, it’s nice to see things tally with what our own David Utter reported as an initial estimate.

According to Thibodeau, Ask’s Mark Stockford, the senior vice president of operations, has seen some savings in other ways, as well.  “The box comes in at a much lower price because it only has the components that are required to support each application,” Stockford said.

On the whole, this development appears to continue a recent uptick in news relating to search and the environment - earlier this week, Microsoft launched a new site called MSN Green, and before that, Yahoo announced its involvement with wind and hydro projects in India and Brazil.