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What Google Search and the Apollo Moon Mission Have in Common

As Neil Armstrong’s death has been on the news and on our minds lately, Google discussed how computing has advanced so much since those early days of space flight.

The Apollo Guidance Computer on board the lunar module executed instructions at a speed around 40 KHz (or 0.00004 GHz)—about 100,000 times slower than a top-of-the-line laptop today.

Google compared a Google Search to the Apollo Moon Mission and discovered that it takes about the same amount of computing to answer one Google Search query as all the computing completed, in flight and on the ground, for the entire Apollo program.

This means that when you enter one search query into Google, you set into motion as much computing as it took to send Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts to the moon—that’s all the computing done on the whole 11-year, 17 mission Apollo program. You could also say Google searches use the computing power of 100 billion Apollo missions since Google handles 100 billion searches each month.

We at Fahrenheit know that without the advancements in computers since that moon landing, we wouldn’t be a company today. Contact us today if you would like to navigate to the top of powerful Google and see how we can help you convert clicks into solid customers.

Fahrenheit Marketing is an Austin web design firm.