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Google's Internet Services: 2 Billion Lines Of Code

This might only seem fascinating to a tech geek like me, but Google Engineering Manager Rachel Potvin estimates the software needed to run all of Google's Internet services — from Google Search to Gmail to Google Maps — spans about 2 billion lines of code.

The reveal came during an engineering conference in Silicon Valley Monday, reports Wired.

By comparison, Microsoft’s Windows operating system — one of the most complex software tools ever built for a single computer, a project under development since the 1980s, likely has around 50 million lines of code.

The interesting comparison highlighted by Wired explains a strategy of collaboration. The 2 billion lines of code that underpin Google's services -- search, maps, docs, Google+, calendar, Gmail, YouTube and more -- are available to other Google Internet service. They sit in a common repository available to all 25,000 Google engineers.

The code becomes building blocks, similar to the Legos found everywhere at Google, which the company's co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem to believe fosters creativity. Potvin explains how Google treats its code like an enormous operating system in a repository for snippets, each control an action that engineers can reuse to build new services or improve on old. 

The concept takes me back to Microsoft Web services where programmers took modules they could plug in to create the same function or similar function in various parts of the Web for different services.

As Potyin points out, the highly sensitive code such as Google's PageRank search algorithm reside in separate repositories only available to specific employees. The code for Android and Chrome also gets stored in different 

She explains that humans not only maintain the health of the code to ensure changes are made and bugs removed, but also bots.

It seems that many of today's high-tech Internet companies run their business similarly. The main Facebook app spans more than 20 million lines of code. Others do the same on a smaller scale, according to Wired.

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