Im just curious to know , which is the programming language behind the following websites.if u know anyone/all of them please tell me.

1- ebay.com
2- amazon.com
3- msn.com ( i assume asp.net)
4- yahoo.com
5- google.com

As i mentioned in previous posts that im in learning mode so i just ask sometimes stupid questions.. and i have to confess that this forum is very excellent place , since its not only providing the free hosting , it is giving me so much knowledge , what Google or others cant give thank you for support always.

People say that google is using a varient of BSD, which is a Unix system. BSD, like Unix, is written in C / C++ mainly. The distributed crawling and caching of data, must be an application buit on the OS, and I suppose they are still written in C / C++. Scripts are too slow for the purpose. The integration with database may be easier , but speed is more important. Yahoo is running BSD too. BSD systems are known to be very stable, probably more stable then Linux and definitely more stable than M$ crappy products.

I assuming you are asking what scripts they are using for their webpages. The only thing we know will be the type of server-side scripting they are using. Database or how they manage their data, we will not know as it is done on the servers and is inivisible to us.

Ebay.com
Most probably JSP. The hint if from the Java logo on it's page. The site is powered by Java.

Amazon.com
Not quite sure. The URL in Amazon are pretty well hidden and the technology used is not very obvious.

Msn.com
ASP definately. It's part of a Microsoft site. We will be laughing if they use any others.

Yahoo.com
Same as Amazon.com, the URL used are pretty well hidden and the technology used is not very obvious.

Google.com
Same as Amazon.com, the URL used are pretty well hidden and the technology used is not very obvious. But I believe Google is using PHP with Zend to speed up processes.

I would presume that Amazon uses C, C++, Java or Perl, as a job advert for a web operator at their UK office reads:


Using the same technique with Yahoo, they seem to use a combination of the same stuff as Amazon, although a larger focus is placed on C++ as the basis of the system, and other languages used purely to display it on the web.


Google seems to have gone the whole hog, and has used virtually every programming language under the Sun. Some parts of the site have been done in Python, as shown with the URLs, other bits appear to be in PHP and they advertise for people with skills in C++, Java and Perl.

Then again, I could be totally wrong.

Wow, I never really knew that. I'm very interested in what Yahoo! used though.

Thanks for the list. It's quite cool just thinking about the language these well known sites use server side for its users. I always thought search engines would have used asp, cgi, php, jsp or something else like that, for the simple reason that they need to be able to execute database commands promptly to produce the relevant information for the users.

I reckon the truth is, as mentioned briefly above, that these sites don't just use one programming language, I reckon they use a variety of different programming languages.

Still, this is just one of those things we will never have the answer for!

This post has been edited by sportytalk: Mar 22 2006, 10:52 PM

Yeah they probably use very much different programming languages, remember, a mixed flavor is the best flavor!

Nice research done by some people by the way!

In addition to the engines that power the searches alot of those sites also use CSS or style sheets and various forms of html. Did you know that those sites where you can not change the size of the fonts with your browser are usually done with style sheets? Style sheets can standardized your font size and look.

i have seen .aspx in the google website. but, this is not the original langauge of the google. also, asp.net language is not the only one language for this website. for this data access (database) i have no idea. but, they pointing (index) of the db is pretty great ...