Google Code Search

by Jonathan Discipulo on April 11th, 2007

There are lots of experiments on-going that you can find in Google Labs. One I find interesting and useful at the same time is the Google Code Search. This Google feature is still in its experimentation stage but is available for public usage. I am very much impressed they have thought of this developer-friendly search.

The feature, unlike the usual web search, returns pages that includes individual files, mostly source codes of different programming languages. This doesn’t only search for the page that contains codes but do search the source codes itself. You have to try it to see it for yourself.

By searching again and again, I have observed that Google Code bot is crawling codes available for public viewing, mostly open source programs, zipped applications, compressed libraries of files and public SVN/CVS repositories.

I like this since it will help developers like me to search for specific classes or functions in a particular application. I can even search using the author’s name or email as the keyword and get the results I wanted. You can also use the version numbers as keywords to filter the versions of the source codes you are searching for.

Here are some screen shots querying Google Code Search for the keyword papervision. Screen 1 is the first page of Google Code Search. Screen 2 is the result page after submission. Screen 3 is the actual source code you did choose from the result page.