Google code-search

Published 10-05-2006 10:02 AM

As developers we often need to look up code-samples or ways to use a certain class. There have been a few offerings in this arena, for example krugle, koders and o'reilly code search (and a few others). Now Google has weight in with their own offering called google code search. Quite interesting to see Google actually doing this since they undoubtfully have one of the biggest (if not the biggest) full-text databases out there.

It seems that at present they are only indexing a bunch of open-source projects (from the FAQ):

We're crawling as much publicly accessible source code as we can find, including archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip), CVS repositories and Subversion repositories.

The number one use of Google search when wearing the developer hat, in my opinion, seems to be searching for error messages though. I would love to see Google crunching code-related error-messages, or even better, maybe even a dedicated error message search engine? :-)

The product is still in a very early stage of development so keep an eye on it. This might just become my homepage at the office when this product matures.

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by Waseem Sadiq

Comments

# Ramon Smits said on Thursday, October 05, 2006 1:20 AM

I did not know the existence of this seach engine :)

After searching for 'effect plasma lang:c#' I got my own code back that is available at my blog.

# Jan Schreuder said on Thursday, October 05, 2006 4:24 AM

I didn't know this either. But it's a great way to find source code. There's also another option which allows you to search for Microsoft related content only:

http://www.google.com/microsoft

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