Search the world's public source code

Post by Russ Cox, Engineering Intern

Google Code Search is now live -- it gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code. It includes:

• Support for precise searches using regular expressions
• Restricts by language, license, or filename with advanced operators
• A search index that includes billions of lines of code

Code Search crawls and indexes publicly hosted archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip) and CVS and Subversion repositories, making them searchable in one place. Results are also accessible via a GData feed, which we hope people will use to create plugins for their favorite editors and IDEs.

The inspiration for Code Search came from a tool we built to quickly search the internal Google code base. This internal search service was used so much that it became clear we should build something for other programmers to use as well -- making that happen became my project when I joined as an Engineering Intern. The team has since gotten a bit bigger, and it's been an incredible experience to be able to lead the engineering efforts, especially as an intern. Check out Code Search and let us know what you think!