Google stepping into the playground of other technology areas has caused trembling for companies as powerful as Microsoft. Koders.com views Google’s entry into code search as a cue for a smile, a roll of quarters in the fist, and a “bring it on” gesture straight out of The Rock’s playbook.
Google debuted its Code Search on Thursday, reportedly with the largest repository of source code available to be queried. Engineering intern Russ Cox posted about the genesis of the new tool on the Google Code blog:
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
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…
And build it they did, competing with existing efforts from sites like Koders and Krugle. But Koders had some thoughts on Google Code Search and their own work, indicating that Koders is ready to move beyond where Google has arrived now (emphasis added):
We are very positive on this news. For a leader like Google to recognize that code discovery is a killer app for search truly validates the Koders vision and innovation.
Since we launched our first beta site in 2004, Koders has received enthusiastic feedback and support from developers worldwide. We have continued to refine our algorithms and expand the scope and quality of our index to deliver state-of-the-art code search for the open source community.
Like Google, Koders started by indexing open source code, but that is a first-phase requirement. There is also a lot of quality code inside private repositories, which is important to professional developers.
Koders is now transitioning beyond the code found easily on the web, into more closed environments, to serve the needs of all developers from open source and enterprise. Koders aims to empower developers with immediate access to quality code. Advances toward that goal include our IDE plugins, our extensible search API and the Enterprise Edition of our core technology.
Back in July we noted how Google’s full-text search and version control for Project Hosting would draw upon Google’s existing technologies for search and storage. Code Search will be a logical extension of their services to developers.
Koders thinks its forthcoming features like an OpenSearch API for open source code and support for ActionScript will make it a logical choice for developers too. They plan to double their index to more than 425 million lines of code, and employ new filters to help people find classes, methods, and interfaces more quickly.
Bring it on Google. Rush and Koders are smiling.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
