Improvements to Google Code Search

By Aleksander Fedorynski, Software Engineer

When I first came to Google, I was curious (and anxious) to learn what project I'd be working on. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I'd be helping build Google Code Search. I felt like a penguin assigned to work on Herring Search -- even more so because the project involved searching with regular expressions, a non-trivial problem to get right. We launched Code Search last October, enabling search over billions of lines of public source code. Today we made some updates to Code Search that will hopefully make it even easier to find the code you're looking for.

First, we've expanded our crawl to include not just complete archives and repositories, but individual code files and sample code snippets from webpages as well. Now when you search for things like [LFractalCanvas] or [nph-refresh], you'll have a better chance of finding what you want. Second, we've made a few ranking adjustments, such as putting class and function definitions closer to the top for a lot of searches. Lastly, Code Search is now available in domains outside the United States, from my home country of Poland, to Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Russia, and Spain, to name a few.

We hope you'll continue giving us feedback on ways to improve Code Search. There's a lot of code out on the web, and we've still got a lot of work left to make it all accessible and useful for developers everywhere.