I was happy to see our favorite language mentioned in a recent article disputing claims that Yahoo!'s index was apparently now double the size of Google's. Better yet was that they provided the code used to run the test. I didn't expect rocket science, they were simply running random queries at the two engines (basically doing the same as many scripts do to find a googlewhack).

I've got to say that although the code did apparently work properly, I was not all that impressed by the code that was used. Perhaps the author was not a native perl coder? I noticed a lot more duplication than I expected, and what I assume are leftover idioms from earlier perl days (srand calls) and some evil if statement logic that I can't explain away!

Either way, since this article is making the rounds, I thought some of my fellow monestarians may like to comment on the code.

ps - sorry if this is posted in the wrong place. Seemed a toss-up to me between here and Perl News

pps - Just noticed that there is another thread about this in CUFP here. Sorry for the dupe.

Moved from Meditations to Perl News by Arunbear.

In reply to NCSA Uses Perl to Compare Google/Yahoo by hubb0r

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