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Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index

swtch.com · 3,986 words · saved by 2 readers

In the summer of 2006, I was lucky enough to be an intern at Google. At the time, Google had an internal tool called gsearch that acted as if it ran grep over all the files in the Google source tree and printed the results. Of course, that implementation would be fairly slow, so what gsearch actually did was talk to a bunch of servers that kept different pieces of the source tree in memory: each machine did a grep through its memory and then gsearch merged the results and printed them. Jeff Dean, my intern host and one of the authors of gsearch, suggested that it would be cool to build a web interface that, in effect, let you run gsearch over the world's public source code. I thought that sounded fun, so that's what I did that summer. Due primarily to an excess of optimism in our original schedule, the launch slipped to October, but on October 5, 2006 we did launch (by then I was back at school but still a part-time intern). I built the earliest demos using Ken Thompson's Plan 9 grep,

Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index or How Google Code Search Worked Russ Cox rsc@swtch.com January 2012 Introduction In the summer of 2006, I was lucky enough to be an intern at Google. At the time, Google had an internal tool called gsearch that acted as if it ran grep over all the files in the Google source tree and printed the results. Of course, that implementation would be fairly slow, so what gsearch actually did was talk to a bunch of servers that kept different pieces of the source tree in memory: each machine did a grep th

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