Python for search engine development

[Alex Martelli]

wittempj at hotmail.com <martin.witte at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, Google applies some Python in their implementation, see
> http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

"Some" is correct.  As for writing a search engine in Python _only_,
hmmm -- I honestly don't know.  You could surely develop a working
implementation, but then, to make it perform well, you'd most likely
want to profile it and retune some CPU-intensive parts using pyrex, or
C.

So, if during your program development process you can find good
open-source C or C++ libraries offering a fast implementation of some of
the CPU-bound stuff you know you'll need, you would probably be better
off by wrapping those libraries (again using pyrex, or maybe SWIG, or
Boost Python for C++, ...) rather than redoing them from scratch in
Python (and probably later having to do some tuning on those parts).
One notably strong point of Python is that it "plays well with others",
and I would advise you to leverage this fact.


Alex