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

6 points by erictobia ↗ HN
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

7 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 24.6 ms ] thread
trickjarrett
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.

kierank
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.
jonursenbach
Whatever their CDN is running on is irrelevant.
CyberFonic
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.