Google Web Server (GWS) is proprietary

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

software that

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

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. GWS is sometimes described as one of the most guarded components of Google's infrastructure. In 2010 GWS was reported as serving 13% of all web sites in the world. In May, 2015, GWS was ranked as the fourth most popular web server on the internet after

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

nginx (pronounced "engine x" , stylized as NGINX or nginx) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Russian developer Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 20 ...

and

Microsoft IIS Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services, IIS, 2S) is an extensible web server created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP. It has been an integral part of th ...

, powering an estimated 7.95% of active websites. Web page requests on most Google pages provide "gws" (without a version number) in the

HTTP header HTTP header fields are a list of strings sent and received by both the client program and server on every HTTP request and response. These headers are usually invisible to the end-user and are only processed or logged by the server and client ...

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:

References

{{Google LLC

Web Server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...