As far as I can see are the big search engines using C++ as their programming language. I remember that Lycos (back then when they were a real search engine) used Perl until they reached a size of about 100mio pages.
From my own engine I know, that Perl is a great language for the crawler and can be used for building the index, but it is definitely too slow for the front end (aka query engine). After doing a lot of experiments with Perl I switched to C for this peticular task.
Now I often hear from people, that they are developing a search engine in Java and I can’t understand that Java is fast enough for ther front end.
Any experiences and recommendations for the ideal languages for the several parts of a search engine?