Google Web Server

Google Web Server (GWS) is a proprietary web server software that Google uses for its web infrastructure. GWS is used exclusively inside Google's ecosystem for website hosting.

In 2008 GWS team was led by Bharat Mediratta.[1] Sometimes GWS is described as one of most guarded components of Google's infrastructure.[2]

In 2010 GWS was reported as serving 13% of all web sites in the world.[3] In May, 2015, GWS was ranked as the fourth most popular web server on the internet after Apache, nginx and Microsoft IIS, powering an estimated 7.95% of active websites.[4] Web page requests on most Google pages provide "gws" (without a version number) in the HTTP header as an indication of the web server software being used.

Information regarding GWS is scarce. In a blog post from Google's Chicago office in 2011, Google provided some details on GWS:

"The Google Web Server (GWS) team builds and improves the proprietary web-serving infrastructure that powers Google web search and many other Google search properties. GWS is involved in almost every user-visible change to the google.com site, meaning that there's frequently something to write home about. We're always looking for gung-ho engineers, ideally with a background in systems and experience working with very large C++ codebases."[5]