[peterbecich]

"ag" and "ag.el" have been of great utility to me. Together they replace "find-grep," and exclude files in a relevant .gitignore from the search.

https://github.com/Wilfred/ag.el

Read find-grep exclusion patterns from a .findignore file: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/19038/6682

[ryukafalz]

Seconded. ag is amazing on its own, but really shines in emacs since all the results have hyperlinks to their files/line numbers.