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General discussion

What kind of script was used to write Google?

Mar 14, 2005 9:58AM PST

What kind of script was used to write Google?

Discussion is locked

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Javascript...

Javascript.

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are you kidding?
Mar 15, 2005 10:33AM PST

there's got to be heavy programming and database work.

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(NT) (NT) I dont think Javascript is powerful enough to do that..
Mar 15, 2005 10:38AM PST
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I think Javascript is powerful enough to do that...

Granted, there are additional non-javascript programming incorporated into the Gmail system, e.g. database hooks ... but that's all backend stuff.

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so what are the backend stuff that Google use?
Mar 17, 2005 8:51AM PST

so what are the backend stuff that Google use?

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Any scripting language can be used
Mar 15, 2005 11:36PM PST

I don't know what google is using, but it really doesn't matter. You can use any scripting language you want:

php, asp, coldfusion, cgi, etc.

You can usually tell what scripting language a site is using by the file extensions, e.g. .php points to php. However, some sites conceal this by creating a new directory for everything. That way, they can use the index file, which doesn't have to be included in the address.

E.g. http://www.mysite.com/search/index.php?q=stars is equivalent http://www.mysite.com/search/?q=stars.

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http://code.google.com/ -< Goto !
Mar 18, 2005 2:42AM PST

Goto http://code.google.com/ and have fun diving into the code. Bring your life preserver since we can help you if you start to drown.

Bob

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I know what it used to be...
Aug 19, 2006 12:18AM PDT

For scripting the main pages Google used some sort of CGI script, probably Perl, or Python, I read which one it was at one point cant remember now. With the advent of Ruby on Rails, and Google releasing their API's and having AJAX support, I would suspect that it is now coded in Ruby.

To the backend; Google used to be running on Solaris boxes, heavily patched I would imagine. The idea that its running NT is seriously far fetched, could you imagine the stack problems with that?! Even Microsoft has problems with its servers restarting every 10 minutes. (Re: a MSDN channel 9 video).

According to MySQL; google is using MySQL servers as its backbone in some areas, though I have heard that Google used objective C and created their own clustered database engine.

Googlebot, their web crawler, in its original form was also written in C or C++. Going by their application form, I would say that most, if not all, of google is now written in C++.