Ask HN: Is Bing running on a non-MS stack?

#1

Post by erictobia » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 4:59 PM UTC

I'll preface this by saying that I make my living as ASP.NET programmer so I'm not trying to slight MS. I'm just curious.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.bing.com

Sample microsoft.com HTTP Response Header:

Cache-Control: public Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8Content-Encoding: gzip Expires: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:56:47 GMT Last-Modified: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:24:31 GMT Vary: Accept-Encoding Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:46:47 GMT Content-Length: 20017

Sample bing.com HTTP Response Header:

Cache-Control: private, max-age=0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:49:51 GMT Content-Length: 9295 Connection: keep-alive

Re: Ask HN: Is Bing running on a non-MS stack?

#2

Post by trickjarrett » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 5:05 PM UTC

There's about a 0.01% chance they would use a Linux architecture. If it came out that they didn't trust Windows to run Bing then it would be a big hit to their server market I think.

I imagine it's not a standard IIS setup though, so the response header is probably unique due to this.

Re: Ask HN: Is Bing running on a non-MS stack?

#3

Post by kierank » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 5:13 PM UTC

www.bing.com appears to me on Akamai and they are huge linux users so in some sense Bing is not on a MS stack.

Re: Ask HN: Is Bing running on a non-MS stack?

#4

Post by johns » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 5:14 PM UTC

From an MS employee: http://twitter.com/shanselman/statuses/1951354013

Re: Ask HN: Is Bing running on a non-MS stack?

#5

Post by chanux » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 5:46 PM UTC

But the Kumo (the code name for bing) days were like this ...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10235400-16.html?part=rss&...

Re: Ask HN: Is Bing running on a non-MS stack?

#6

Post by ScottWhigham » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 6:19 PM UTC

johns wrote: post #4

From an MS employee: http://twitter.com/shanselman/statuses/1951354013

"That's a netcraft caching/CDN bug. I've confirmed that Bing is in the MSFT Data Centers, all Windows/IIS." - that's an odd bug............

Re: Ask HN: Is Bing running on a non-MS stack?

#7

Post by jonursenbach » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 8:59 PM UTC

kierank wrote: post #3

www.bing.com appears to me on Akamai and they are huge linux users so in some sense Bing is not on a MS stack.

Whatever their CDN is running on is irrelevant.

Re: Ask HN: Is Bing running on a non-MS stack?

#8

Post by CyberFonic » Fri, Jun 05, 2009, 12:56 AM UTC

MS bought Powerset in order to bring Bing to market (just like they bought QDOS to sell to IBM as MSDOS).

PowerSet uses:

Natural language parser from Xerox Parc http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9940887-80.html

Apache http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/hadoop-core-user/20...

Puppet server farm admin tools http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/WhosUsingPuppet

Dell servers running Linux http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2007-Sept...

Wikipedia entry (as indexed by PowerSet) : http://www.powerset.com/explore/semhtml/Powerset_(company)?q...

I'm sure there are more smoking guns out there. I found the above with Bing !!! (cross-checked with Google)

So is SCO going to sue MS for purloining "their tech" ??? Should be enough dough to get them out of bankruptcy.