Searching Source Code

Google announced two new services, Google Code Search and Google Blog Search Pinging.

In this post, I’ll discuss Google Code Search. Google code Search is meant to be able to search through publicly available source code based on regular expressions, strings, license type, and a few other criteria. I haven’t done any exhaustive tests on Google Code Search yet but it’s nice to see Google expanding beyond straight search to more refined searches like the type needed for trolling through source code or finding the most relevant blogs.

The user interface is the familiar Google search interface and the results currently don’t appear to be displaying ads.

If you’re in need of a search engine for source code, don’t forget to check out Krugle. I prefer the interface of Krugle a bit more as it’s easy to search for something within source code, and then hit one of the other tabs and show relevant results from blogs or other web pages and from projects as well. This is something for Google to catch up on.

Here are some screenshots of both code searching services.
Google Code Search Home