Search code examples
search-engine

What Language(s)/technology was used to make the old school search engines like Excite, Altavista, Lycos?

I'm just doing some research into the Language(s) and Technologies used to build the old school search engines like Excite, Altavista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves?

What i would love to know is the Technology used to create them originally and the databases used?for example the first version of Google.com was built using Java and Python.

Thank you in advance ;-)

Solution

  • Google employees Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat say in their paper "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters" that Google used ad hoc distribution of the processing of their big input file for the indexing, including 3800 LOC C++ for one (!) phase.

    I guess working code was a big mixture of hand refined high level languages and scripts to pass the data around to many machines. No databases until GFS + Bigtable were around.