Sunday, October 16, 2011


Goodbye Google



Google announced they're shutting down Code Search.

I found Google Code Search to be invaluable in the kind of work I do. I saved tons of time by being able to find existing code for something tricky already invented. Or I could compare multiple implementations for things to learn about what different techniques there are for various operations and learn immensely from their pros and cons. If you're reimplementing something yourself, it's also nice to be easily able to find tests cases and other things with Google Code Search.

Now all that is going away. Are there any feasible alternatives? Do we need to start a competing search engine? What are programmers to do when Google cuts the number one online tool for researching code?

8 comments:

Jones said...

http://www.koders.com/

Haven't used it in a while, but I remember it did yield a few hits that Google didn't.

insane coder said...

In my tests of it, its usefulness pails in comparison to Google Code Search.

greyspot said...

There isn't really much that compares to Google Code Search.

GCS, you will be missed...

tcf628 said...

I'm involved in a project that allows search for special characters.
http://www.symbolhound.com

It's not source code search but a symbol-inclusive web search. It may be useful for some of the same purposes.

boyter said...

http://searchco.de/?q=%2FkSecReturnData%2F

You can do regex search over code at searchco.de now.

tcf628 said...

Edit: SymbolHound now does open source code repository search (a substitute for GCS)- try it here: http://symbolhound.com/codesearch/ (Beta)

-Tom (co-founder)

kklis said...

I have been using koders.com for years and I consider it a valuable replacement for GCS.

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