Mike has only given part of the answer there. GNU grep obviously is very I/O tuned. And GNU grep optimizes the special cases of constant strings and of regex

Mike has only given part of the answer there. GNU grep obviously is very I/O tuned. And GNU grep optimizes the special cases of constant strings and of regexps that (more or less) start with a constant string -- but there's more! GNU grep is also fast for most commonly encountered non-constant-string regexps (even those that don't start with a constant string) because its regexp engine avoids backtracking by doing an on-the-fly conversion (of many patterns) to a DFA. These extra cases are algorithmically neat and when you want them, you're glad they're there -- but they are less sexy in benchmarks because the most common use case in the real world, by far, is a search for a constant string.