Skip to main content

Google Launches Code Search

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!

Editors' Recommendations

Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
HP launches a new gaming laptop and HyperX accessories
hp omen 17 2024 launch 4

HP continues to refresh its lineup of premium gaming laptops with the latest Omen 17. Featuring the latest AI-enhanced AMD Ryzen 8000-series mobile chips, it is the first Omen product to come with a dedicated Copilot key for Microsoft's latest AI assistant.

Additionally, the laptop offers AI-enhanced meeting features like enhancing the built-in webcam and microphone for an improved video calling experience. And with Otter.ai, users can transcribe meetings and have access to AI-generated notes.

Read more
How to search ChatGPT conversations
A laptop screen shows the home page for ChatGPT, OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot.

ChatGPT has been hailed as a revolutionary tool in the technology space. However, it does have its limitations in terms of interface functionalities. One such constraint is the lack of an integrated search that would allow you to easily bring up former conversations by typing a simple keyword or phrase.

ChatGPT does keep an itemized history of former conversations that you can reference manually on the left side of the home page. Once you find the conversation you’re looking for, you can click it and it will repopulate in the main response space. However, if you’re a power user with hundreds of prior queries who might want to refer back to old results, this could be somewhat of a challenge.

Read more
How to delete Google Chrome on Windows and Mac
Google Chrome with pinned tabs on a MacBook on a table.

Google Chrome is a user-friendly web browser that is packed with useful features and intuitive controls. It’s also the default browser for pretty much any Chrome-branded product you purchase. Even if you prefer Safari or Firefox, we bet Chrome has one or two things you would dig. But what if you've added Google Chrome to your Windows or macOS machine, and you’ve decided you don’t like the dang thing?

Read more