ConsciousQuery

The main plugin page

Inspiration

We wanted to make something that would inform the average Chrome user about the environmental impact of a search query. Additionally, we noticed that college students specifically are the most frequent users of AI, and many companies now have AI features that cannot be removed even if you want to. While trying to eliminate AI is unrealistic, we believe that if people simply know more about the impacts of a google query, they will be more conscious of their usage.

What it does

This Chrome extension tracks Google query activity and also when Chrome's AI, Gemini, pops up on a search, as it does not appear for every query. It then calculates the carbon emissions and other metrics to help visualize the environmental impact of the queries with and without AI.

How we built it

JavaScript, HTML, CSS

Challenges we ran into

We originally wanted to integrate this extension onto ChatGPT as well, as it is the most popular AI chatbot, however, we found that to be much more difficult compared to Chrome. We ended up finding a way to track chatGPT queries but ran out of time so we weren't able to add it to our existing code. We all had very limited experience with web development, so it wasn't easy to start at first.