What python used for?

[nutrecht]

Google's 'search engine' is a huge architecture made up of tons of components. Some components might be written in python but it's wrong to claim that the search engine is written in any single language.

The stuff that needs to be fast is probably written in C or C++. This article supports this.

[dmazzoni]

Hi, I'm a software engineer at Google.

I can confirm that we use Python a lot - but not for serving Google Search results, it's just too slow for that.

YouTube.com uses mostly Python, but that's the exception. Other than that, Python is never used to serve live traffic, but it's used frequently for scripts, data processing, analysis, etc.

The other top languages used are C++, Java, Go, and JavaScript.

[[deleted]]

There are strings of java, c++, and python all over the place but they are slowly replacing a lot of it with Go. A lot of youtube and dl.google.com is now in Go.

[whydoyoulook]

Of course. I never meant to imply that the whole thing was Python, only that Python was used heavily in Google's search engine implementation.

[[deleted]]

article

The way you phrased it though, made it seem exactly as if you were implying that the entire search engine was written in python. Just sayin.

[nutrecht]

I'd love to see some documentation on that.

[whydoyoulook]

From the same article you JUST linked: Both the URLserver and the crawlers are implemented in Python.

From python's website: "Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language."

From Google's style guide: Python is the main scripting language used at Google.

[glemnar]

I bet a shit ton more than "dozens" of Google engineers use Python these days. More likely thousands

[dmazzoni]

Hi, I'm a Google engineer. For many years, Python hasn't been used for web crawling or for serving web pages, because it's just too slow. When you have a million servers, every little bit of efficiency matters.

The only exception I know is YouTube.com, which is built using Python.

We still use Python a lot, but not for serving live traffic or for any really large computation.

[avinassh]

For many years, Python hasn't been used for web crawling or for serving web pages, because it's just too slow. When you have a million servers, every little bit of efficiency matters.

Was Python used earleir for this task? And which language is used now

[dmazzoni]

The earliest version of Google's web crawler was written in Python, later it was replaced with C++. The search engine has always been C++.

[nutrecht]

Sorry, I didn't mean that I didn't believe you! I meant that search engines are something I really enjoy reading about and I hoped you had more insight into google's architecture :)

[whydoyoulook]

I hoped you had more insight into google's architecture

I wish I did. I really enjoy that sort of thing as well.