Google Launches Code Search

If you've ever used Google to "research" school papers and essays, you may be thrilled with its new Code Search project, which can help with your computer science courses!

Internet search giant Google has launched another operation designed to better meet specialized search needs—and this time, it aims at geeks.

Just out of Google Labs, Google Code Search is an effort to index publicly accessible computer source code. Google’s operation will take it into code hosting projects such as Sourceforge.net and Google’s own code services, dips into versioning and cource control repositories managed by CVS and Subversion, and even opens up and indexes contents of compressed archives and tarballs, including support for tar, zip, and gzip formats. Code search results will also be accessible via a Gdata feed which developers can use to integrate support for code searches into developer tools, editors, compilers, and development environments. Google Code Search supports searching by regular expressions, supports restricting searches by language, filename, and even license terms, and already indexes billions of lines of code.

According to Eric Case on the Google Code blog, the idea came from a tool Google built to search its internal code base, which became so popular that expanding it for the use of other programmers became an obvious thing to do.

And we’re sure budding programmers and computer science students everywhere will be grateful, in the same way students of other disciplines like history, psychology, English, and literature have long-loved Google’s mainstream search engine for its ability to…um, unearth critical data just before a paper’s due date!