Via ValleyWay: Google will launch a source code search engine tonight

Google will launch a search engine for source code tonight, but journalists informed of the launch agreed to a press embargo until 9 PM.

Well, it’s live right now.  The homepage has a list of possible searches, with full regular expression support.  You can limit to only one language too using the lang: prefix, e.g. lang:”c#”. As you can see from the 1st result, it’s not perfect.  Pretty nice though.  It’s also really funny to see what people put into their comments:

So many developers who feel the need to apologise for their code.

There’s an odd bug if you go to the end of the search results too.  For example, if you do an lang:c# search it says there’s around 87,300 results.  But once I get to page 14, results 131 (of 92,000 now), it won’t let me go any further.  It doesn’t say anything about a supplemental index, but I assume that’s what’s being hit here.  Just odd that there’s no message at all, it increases the ’start’ querystring value, but the page doesn’t change.  Oh well, this one hasn’t even made it to perpetual beta yet, it’s still in the labs.

Update: There’s already a Mycroft search engine available for it too.

It’s a top idea anyway, and if it does what it’s supposed to, it will really help.  For instance, I was looking for a binary search method in c# the other day, and I could have just done this: lang:”c#” binarysearch. Nice.

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