Google Launches Google Code Search

Posted on November 10, 2006

Google announced they have launched Google Code Search. This is a search tool that searches public source code. There are many ways this could be helpful to a developer. You can search by regular expressions. You can also restrict a search by language, license or filename.

Bret Taylor, Senior Product Manager, says in the post, "I am really excited about this launch, as it caps off a long sequence of Google product launches for developers in the past year, including Google Maps API v2, Google Calendar API, Google Web Toolkit, Google AJAX Search API, Google Checkout API, project hosting on Google Code, Google Base API, and Google Gadgets for Your Page. Google's developer team is focused on building tools that help developers extend and improve Google's products and improve their own applications, and we are really excited to see all the amazing things that have been created already (traffic map for your Google homepage, anyone?)."

Google Blogoscope points out a funny way to search Google Code Search by searching for swear words that grumpy programmers may have inserted in the code. For example, see the search results for sucks -- which is not a swear word but still a grumpy comment a programmer might make when they are frustrated.

Update 3-20-15: Google recently announced that Google Code will be shut down in 2016. New project creation has already been disabled. Google says it is migrating many of its own open source projects to GitHub.