[gruseom]

Google made a mistake in killing code search. Indexing the world's source code and making it searchable is so obviously part of their core mission that I wonder how this decision even got made.

Yeah, code search is a niche market numerically speaking, but intellectually and economically (considering the economic impact of software) it is vital. Google was doing so much better a job of it than anybody else that they completely owned the space. How could that not be worth what it cost them to run it? And now we are bereft of anything good.

I used to use Google Code Search like this: encounter an unfamiliar language or API construct, go to code search, get page after page of real-world usages. Or like this: wonder how to do X, imagine what code that does X might say, search for snippets of that until hitting a working example of X. It was a powerful learning device that I am sad to lose. I sure hope a startup comes along to get search right for the world's source code. Github ought to, but their search sucks.

In any case, congratulations Russ Cox et. al. on a brilliant piece of work.

[pshc]

From Steve Yegge's most recent blog rant:

Now, as it happens, I am in fact working on a very cool project at Google. [...] a project that aims to turn source code -- ALL source code -- from plain text into Wikipedia.

[gruseom]

Ah. Well, the decision to kill Code Search would make sense if it were in favour of something better. But then why kill it now and leave nothing for any length of time? Also, there's no guarantee the new thing will turn out to actually be better.

For a company that succeeded partly by leveraging the economic value of hackers in a way that hadn't been been done before, this decision is disturbingly out of character. It feels like something that must have happened for inward-facing political reasons - in other words, a sign of rot.

I get that Steve told Larry to focus, but "code" and "search" almost define focus in their case.

Edit: It seems the service is still available under a different URL. Weird, but I'll happily take it! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3487950

[rachelbythebay]

Historically, there were two types of projects at Google: the one that's deprecated and the one that doesn't work yet. It seems they have amended that slightly so now it's break-before-make during a migration instead of the other way around.

[boyter]

You mentioned hoping someone can come along to get this right. I am certainly trying with http://searchco.de/

Its still a long way from being close to Google code search both in terms of code indexed (amending that as I write this) but I hope to get things up-to a par as soon as I possibly can.

Symbolhound http://symbolhound.com/ also has a code index that's worth a look too.

[jauco]

That's a seriously cool website. You're obviously still developing it, but way to go!

[boyter]

Thanks. Working on increasing the index size and speed for the moment. Live indexes will be coming up soon too.

[dncrane]

SymbolHound developer here, thanks for the mention boyter!

[boyter]

No problem at all. The more people attacking the problem the better off we all are.

[inerte]

Did it stop working internally? Do Google employees still get to use it?

[178]

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/01/google-code-search-... —» http://code.google.com/codesearch

[rsc]

In the long term, this will be search only over code.google.com projects, as mentioned in the 'discussion' link on codesearch.google.com.

[gruseom]

So it was too good to be true then. :(

[6ren]

Oh, thank you. This is my favourite form of ego-surfing. It's so nice to see my code, uploaded by someone else, modified and used in different ways. It's nice to think it could outlive me.

[gruseom]

Wow. If this really is the same service that was available before - which it looks like it is - then thanks!

p.s. You should submit this as a story in its own right.