foofighter
Jedi Council Member
Now this if somewhat ironic. I was partly wrong! I used said Google search engine to double-verify my assertions above, and it turns out that they are a bit outdated. Earlier this year Google did release the following:foofighter said:As far as I know Google's internal data structure is based on BigTable and the MapReduce algorithm for searching. Neither of these are related to regular expressions, and it would be quite impossible to allow usage of regular expressions to search Google, and as I said, neither would they want to. Furthermore, no, the Google search language is not a subset of regular expressions. It is quite different, and intentionally so. These are facts that are easily verifiable by using not-regular-expressions with said Google search engine.
_http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp3.html
which is a RE engine that works on BigTable. This still does not mean that the language used to search Google is regular expressions (or even a subset thereof), but if they wanted to, I suppose they could.
It doesn't change any of my impressions of Clif and the interview, but I myself will make sure to double-verify my own assertions in the future. C'est la vie.