Back before decent search engines, there was gopher or ftp search. I used to search for function names or some part of some API in gopher (or ftp search), and

Back before decent search engines, there was gopher or ftp search. I used to search for function names or some part of some API in gopher (or ftp search), and find source code in projects where the code was already in use. Then use that to get hints about where I was going wrong. Google and StackOverflow fill a much wider niche however.