12 ms·

Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

318 points by thisisblurry 15y ago

chintan 15y ago
Speaking of focus, we went from "Organizing Worlds Information" ==> "Organizing People in to Circles" Indeed exciting times!
bdonlan 15y ago
It's too bad about code search - that was really helpful for finding example code (and linking to specific snippets of code within open-source projects!)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
kpozin 15y ago
This is awful. Code Search is an indispensable tool for finding reference code and real-world uses of various libraries. I don't know of anything on par with it.
- gojomo 15y ago
  I'm not familiar enough with either to know if they are of equal power, but an alternative to Google Code Search might be Krugle open-source search: http://opensearch.krugle.org http://opensearch.krugle.org
- simonw 15y ago
  GitHub search is pretty good - it only searches code that's been hosted (or mirrored) on GitHub, but that's a LOT of code.
  - nene 15y ago
    IMHO Github code search totally sucks. It's better than nothing, but it feels like the bare minimum - just a normal fulltext index applied to source code. - It's not case-sensitive, which sucks for searching code. - It's unable to search for any punctuation characters (searching for "foo()" is the same as searching for "foo"), which totally sucks for searching source code. - The search finds lots and lots of duplicates. Even multiple matches in one file are listed as completely separate results. - You can limit the search to one of the languages in dropdown menu, but if your language of choice doesn't happen to be in there, you're out of luck. For example you can't limit your search only to C header files. Simply by adding package:github.com to Google Code Search search box one can apply a better tool for code in github, but unfortunately the good times seem to be over soon. Really sad to see it go...
CJefferson 15y ago
I'm very disappointed to see google code search go. It was very useful (for me at least, don't read this as a comment on the whole committee / process) in finishing the new C++ standard, and answering the question "Well, did anyone ever really write code like X?" (the answer was usually yes). Buzz makes a lot of sense, although I imagine some users will be disappointed it couldn't be more 'cleanly' imported into google+.
- icefox 15y ago
  Same here on google code. I have used it on multiple occasions to find out how users are using a class or API to get a feel for what API was actually used for. Not to mention when learning a new API having the ability to see real world usage was always helpful. Not to mention the ease of finding apps that had security issues in codebases after it was found. Anyone know of a replacement for this?
  - mapleoin 15y ago
    Well github's code search is a pretty good replacement, although it's limited to github.
    - geraldalewis 15y ago
      GitHub's code search lacks regular expressions, which makes it far less useful than Google Code Search.
- perlgeek 15y ago
  I also found the code search very useful, and usually used it to answer a similar question: does anybody use a Perl feature that is about to change (due to a bug fix, for example) or for which changes were proposed. I didn't use it all that often, but when I did, I was very grateful for having it.
- zackb 15y ago
  Did they give a reason for shutting down code search? I didn't see it but think it deserves some kind of explanation of the decision.
lithiumn 15y ago
Hate to see code search go. I always found it useful when having problems with some less-well documented libraries to see how they were used in the real world.
mcfunley 15y ago
I used code search just yesterday. Super lame.
spiffistan 15y ago
There's a competitor to google code search at least: http://www.koders.com/ http://www.koders.com/ Actually, I'm kinda glad they're phasing stuff out. It shows courage to do that, a lesson probably hard learned at google. They have a myriad of products, but would probably do much better with them if they thoroughly finished them before release.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  Yes, one of the things Larry Page talked about in the earnings call yesterday was aggressive project pruning and focus. I agree that this is a good sign of Page's leadership.
  - frossie 15y ago
    The danger lies in being a company with a reputation of launching stuff and then not sticking with them. At some point that starts harming adoption levels of new products. Edit to comment below: "Trying and failing is a far better outcome than never having tried at all" is a great mantra for individuals or even small startups, but I am not sure how it applies here. I am still bitter over Google abandoning Notebook (which I was quite a heavy user of) and canning Calendar Public Search (search!!). I then reluctantly allowed my team to use Wave, only to have that one canned after building a process around it. No, it is not better for me that they tried and changed their minds (they did NOT "fail" technically), because I could have picked another product at the time that did intend to stick around. People look at Google, with all the money and people that it has, and ask "How much could it POSSIBLY cost to keep Code Search going? How is it possible that Google can't afford it?". The only answer I can come up with is (1) It can afford it (2) But it doesn't care to. So sure, if you are happy to see Google launch stuff that it has no commitment to, great for you. I'm having better luck taking chances with startups and their products. At least they have skin in the game. Edit #2: @joebadmo - but that is exactly what I think when I see a new Google product - "will it reach such large levels of adoption so that Google will keep it". And I keep getting it wrong - even for products like Wave and Code Search which I thought surely they are used internally and so will be kept around if only because of that - nope, either they are not used internally (if not, why not?) or even that is not protection enough. Sure, startups and small-person concerns are also risky propositions, but let's not forget the numbers. 100,000 users are a "failure" for google, but they are a wild success for a small startup, at least the ones not looking for a big exit. If you inlcude app writers as "startups", their longevity is phenomenal - I have never had an app stop working on me because somebody turned a sever off somewhere. Perhaps I have been freakishly lucky. The only other product I have had to stop using because it was pulled was wesabe.com.
dustingetz 15y ago
buzz was awesome for link sharing via a bookmarklet to my professional audience (compare to facebook bookmarklet for life stuff). plus isn't there yet -- plus doesn't expose RSS feeds to work with my audience's existing workflows. damn. any word on a plus RSS api? i want my stream, and i want my +1 feed. i was looking into the +1 stream yesterday, seems like google made it as hard as possible to hit from javascript -- nonstandard http post, no JSONP = i don't know if its possible to do client-side. damn x2.
- freshlog 15y ago
  Hey dustingetz, You might like to take a look at Handpick: http://handpick.me http://handpick.me You'll be able to create different groups of people to collect links for via a bookmarklet throughout the day and send them via a single email at the end of the day.
- nl 15y ago
  https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/list https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/list It returns JSON (and you need to OAuth it), but it gives the stream info you are after. https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/search https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/search (with your name) is useful too.
mahmoudimus 15y ago
I'm actually really surprised that code search is getting phased off. It's a great resource to see how libraries are implemented in the wild -- it also exposes some common errors that lots of library authors make. So sad to see this one go -- but I think it will make for another opportunity to allow a competing site like koders.com to iterate on building a product that developers would love to use...I hope.
seltzered_ 15y ago
does this mean google reader sharing now goes to plus? Me and a close group of friends use google reader a lot for sharing and commenting, personally more than i ever use plus or facebook. sharing on google reader also shared on google buzz as well though.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  My friend group is the same, but this was always annoying because Buzz didn't go back into Greader. So I had one friend who would post to Buzz instead of Reader, but I would miss his posts unless I actually went to the Buzz interface, where I would still have to wade through all the Reader shared stuff. I'm glad it's all moving to +. I can only assume that sharing from Reader will be connected to + at some point. There's currently a workaround for this, but it's ugly.
- jgavris 15y ago
  i also liked buzz for bringing reader shares / comments into my inbox / buzz feed...i think the value of buzz was underestimated. i hope google brings the same integrations to google+. external sites were the bomb!
EGreg 15y ago
I can understand about Google Buzz ... they are replacing it with Google+. But what about Code Search? It's like they mention it once, and then don't give a reason. I think that was useful for many people! I wonder why they are closing it...
tlogan 15y ago
What is the best alternative to Google Code Search?
- pbreit 15y ago
  http://www.koders.com http://www.koders.com or http://opensearch.krugle.org http://opensearch.krugle.org
  - tlogan 15y ago
    Thanks. It seems like these two options are way behind Google Search. Maybe there is opportunity here to build a pay service for developers (like to find implementation patterns, common bugs, etc.). Anyway, I just want to express my disbelief with this google decision: Google is synonym for search. All kind of searches. Meaning if Google cannot provide good search for open source code then something is terribly wrong. When can say everything about Google and some failures of Google, but they are very very good in search. And, they want to be around for next 15 years, they must not lose on that front (even if it is just "open source search"). Anyway, I hope DuckDuckGo or some other search engine will try to do something here...
- daliusd 15y ago
  Recently I have found out that google search "function/class/variable/anything else filetype:extension" works even better than google code search.
  - reinhardt 15y ago
    I don't know how well does code search work for searching punctuation but I'm sure general web search doesn't cut it.
    - uriel 15y ago
      Code Search allows using regexps for searching, which is one of the things that made it super awesome.
- 15y ago
ch 15y ago
Sad to see Code Search go. I just tried a simple search for 'pthread_t' on both Koders (http://www.koders.com http://www.koders.com) and Krugle (http://opensearch.krugle.org http://opensearch.krugle.org). Both are mentioned elsewhere in the comments as possible alternatives. Krugle found no results. Koders found results, but the response time was very large. Both have a long way to go in being a viable Code Search replacement. Hopefully Code Search just gets rolled into the primary Google search product. NOTE: I was just looking over the Koders results. It is tokenizing 'pthread_t' as 'pthread' 't', so the top results are not what I would consider useful. I'm sure I can change some settings to get proper tokenization for my languages identifiers, but that is more work up front.
- Uhhrrr 15y ago
  Double quotes seem to stop it from tokenizing, e.g. "pthread_t".
  - ch 15y ago
    Yes, but in a code search engine it would make sense to not break words that are valid symbols in more programming languages than not. It's all about sensible defaults.
    - gtani 15y ago
      There's a lot of significance in function/method signatures and non-alphanum chars that google is getting to grips with (and hoogle/hayoo for haskell seems to be state of the art). Ruby Class#method, the (dozens or more) symbolic "operators" in scala, haskell, ocaml (which are generally functions, not operators). I think it's up to each language community to build those tools now.
pbreit 15y ago
I'm surprised about the Code Search news. That seems to be squarely within Google's mission.
- jrockway 15y ago
  How do you sell ads on a bunch of code results? That's the only logical explanation I see for shutting this down. I find a globally-searchable database of code useful enough to want to rewrite this myself. I won't get all of the Internet, but if I can get Github and GNU / Apache / etc., it will be enough.
  - pbreit 15y ago
    i"ve only thought about it for about 30 seconds but it would seem to be the absolute best place to post engineering job ads.
    - VladRussian 15y ago
      interesting source code centric adwords can be imagined here - bidding on specific language, api, library, product :)
    - mongol 15y ago
      Also - ads for e-books perhaps. If you end up looking at Hibernate code, you are struggling with Hibernate. Why not clicking on "Hibernate In Action"?
kingkilr 15y ago
No! I loved code search, I'd use it as evidence when proposing the deprecation of API methods in open source projects :)
chaosmachine 15y ago
Google Code Search has been pretty broken (for my use case, anyway) for a while. I build Drupal Code Search[1] on top of their API back in 2008, and a few months later, they stopped indexing code from Drupal.org. Since then, 2 new versions of Drupal (6 and 7) have been released, and none of the new code has been indexed, making my site largely useless except for legacy code searches. I guess I will just shut it down completely come 2012, I don't have any way to do grep-style searches at the same speed Google's API could. [1] http://drupalcodesearch.com/ http://drupalcodesearch.com/
- jjwiseman 15y ago
  Was it broken in some way other than it didn't index drupal.org?
  - bartl 15y ago
    Drupal.org most likely was not the only site they no longer indexed. Probably no code site was still being indexed, at all.
siddhant 15y ago
Buzz is fine. But what was wrong with Code Search?
plq 15y ago
i don't understand why codesearch has to go. granted, it felt a bit neglected lately, but it was truly useful. i wish there was a way for google to open source their abandoned projects. i'm sure someone would be willing to offer a similar service by basing it what the google code search already does.
kpanghmc 15y ago
Does anyone know what they mean by this? "we will remove iGoogle's social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are." Are they referring to Google Chat or are they referring to iGoogle widgets that have "social features" (e.g. Twitter widgets, Facebook widgets, etc.)?
- abraham 15y ago
  Some gadgets have social features so interact with friends who also use the same gadget. For example there could be a gadget that lets you search for and watch YouTube videos and friends you allow can see what videos you watched. Those gadgets are going away. You Chat will still be there and gadgets that interact with third-party social sites will still be there too.
rockerarj 15y ago
That's what I really like about Google. A company with too many products just hanging in there making losses is a company with a low morale. I think accepting the loss and shutting down low performance products is very important.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
saurik 15y ago
So, in 2005 I was involved in a company that thought "man, it would be great to build a search engine for source code". I even started putting together components for it, such as a model for finding text inside of larger documents that had statistical properties similar to code, auto-detecting the language, so you could find code snippets inside of blog posts. However, by the time we got organized enough to actually do it, Google Code launched, and had this really awesome code searching feature, that everyone considered to be "more than good enough" and "comprehensive, as Google is indexing the hell out of stuff like this". But, now, Google has now determined that that wasn't sustainable, and has shut down the project. Which means that both our company, and any other company, that thought it had a sustainable model for running such a project, and at this point would probably be "pretty awesome", never started, and we are all suddenly thrust back into 2005, unable to search for code. This... (I now emphatically point at the previous paragraphs) is why I don't like Google very much: they have such large resources available to them that they tend to just swoop in and offer an unsustainable service at a loss, training users that "things should be so free it hurts: in fact, they must be losing money on every use of this" (Google Voice being a great example), thereby stifling innovation by people who can't possibly undercut that. Note: this isn't even a problem specific to Google... startup companies that get VC money tend to also cause this problem. They get tons of money, offer a service at a heavy loss while they use that burn time to determine a business model, actively knowing that they are operating at a loss in order to get users as fast as possible from other people who might try to get them. Of course, the result is that the company usually either totally implodes (typical of any startup) or, even more insidiously (for the projects that actually becoming successful, even quite popular / common), come up with a business model so ludicrous that the users actively revolt against the entire concept of the service... ... and, where do they go? To some other free service offered by another company that managed to get equally large sums of VC money because they point at that other company that had hundreds of millions of users that just failed because of a bad business model, something they will know how to fix (in a couple years or so, once they get around to figuring that part out...). :( I liked Google Code search, and I'm going to miss it.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  Which means that both our company, and any other company, that thought it had a sustainable model for running such a project, and at this point would probably be "pretty awesome", never started, and we are all suddenly thrust back into 2005, unable to search for code. I see two viable reactions to this: 1. There's now a vacuum where Code Search was, and, evidently, some demand. Why not startup now? 2. Not even Google could find a viable model for Code Search, even with their resources and scale, and (ugh) synergy. Google did the research for me. (And if you think Google dropped it because they couldn't find a viable free model, and you think there's a viable paid model, see #1.) As for startups, the phenomenon you describe seems to apply mostly to things that depend on network effect and probably advertising. If you have an idea that brings value to someone and can demonstrate a sustainable business model based on charging for that value, I would imagine that to be a much more attractive option for people who want something they can depend on than a VC funded free product startup.
heydenberk 15y ago
I liked Buzz's idea of integrating a social inbox with the an email inbox, and in particular I liked Reader integration with Buzz. If Google doesn't integrate Reader and Gmail with Plus more effectively, I'll be spending _less_ time being social with Google than before.
ajays 15y ago
I may be biased, but: I feel like Google's "geek cred" is slipping. It feels like PMs (and their "monetization strategies") are gaining control over at El Goog, shutting down anything that isn't "revenue positive". You can't measure geek cred. You can't measure the second-order effect of services like Code Search. So the slow slide of Google turning into "just another tech company" starts...
- sixtofour 15y ago
  "You can't measure geek cred. You can't measure the second-order effect of services like Code Search." And so as a publicly owned, regulated, billion dollar corporation, it no longer make sense to commit unmeasured resources to support unmeasurable benefits.
  - ajays 15y ago
    Every day companies like Google and Yahoo do things which don't have a directly measurable benefit. Why does Yahoo put out YUI, Hadoop, YTS for free? Why does Google give out protobufs, GWT for free? Why are there public tech talks at these companies? Can you quantify the benefit of such activities?
  - dasil003 15y ago
    What do you mean unmeasured resources? Look, I admit that you can't make good business decisions on Google's scale without using the data. That, however, is not Google's problem. It's also important to have vision and principles that everyone in the company understands, otherwise it's impossible to keep thousands of employees moving in the same direction. It would be very easy for Larry to make a decision like: "One of our core values is to put engineering first, this makes us a place where the smartest engineers want to work, and keeping Google Code around is a strong external indicator of this, therefore we should spend $1,000,000/year maintaining it regardless of profits." Despite the lack of data you could not fault a CEO for making a gut call like that. Just because you can't measure something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
    - sixtofour 15y ago
heydenberk 15y ago
Also: there will always be people decrying Google's tendency to launch and phase out new products and there will always be people decrying its reticence to try new things even if they fail, and they're probably doing a good job if they're attracting roughly equal amounts of these responses.
boomboom 15y ago
boom
sdfjkl 15y ago
I wouldn't miss Code search much if the regular Google search would understand regular expressions or terms with underscores. But it does not, and also increasingly annoys me by misinterpreting my search terms and searching for the things it believes I meant instead of the things I told it to search for. And while DuckDuckGo has a much nicer search frontend, it's Bing-fed index sadly sucks, making it no universal replacement for Google's declining frontend.
blauwbilgorgel 15y ago
Very saddened to see 'University Research Program for Google Search' go. Google's index offers an exciting corpus for linguistics and AI study. The current search API's just don't cut it for proper research (for example: just 64 results per query and 1000 queries a day [1] and the "estimatedResultCount" being off by a factor of 10-100 [2]). I believe spammers were abusing the Google translate API to spin articles in different languages. This contributed to it being closed down. I don't hope that Google's search API is crippled to thwart the bad apples. Because then those that follow the TOS (don't crawl Google's results) have little recourse, but to halt their research (Yahoo Boss and Bing Api give little solace). [1] Too few for either deep analysis or learning queries like: "X is a *" and "X, such as *," [2] Estimated results for "test". With API: 257.000.000 vs. manual search 2.750.000.000
- shriphani 15y ago
  Would this help in any way? http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/focus/cs/web-ngram.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/focus/cs/w...
- pandeiro 15y ago
  Off topic but in response to your conjecture about the Google Translate API: My own is that they are protecting against the harvesting of their AI algorithm's output.
lost-theory 15y ago
Nullege is still great search engine for python code. http://nullege.com/ http://nullege.com/
cygwin98 15y ago
I hope Google open source the code behind Code Search. They don't have to release all supporting libraries that are specific to Google's infrastructure though. Such that those of us who actually use the service can figure out a scaled-down implementation to serve ourselves.
tambourine_man 15y ago
It never worked all that well for me. What I want is a "curl | grep" for the web. Just something that searches the entire page, including <head> <!--> etc. I can do without fancy semantics. But Google tries to be smart even on quoted queries. And that annoys me deeply.
- Donald 15y ago
  >But Google tries to be smart even on quoted queries. And that annoys me deeply. They're just trying to redirect you to more profitable (i.e., a greater probability that you will impress an ad) search queries.
saibotd 15y ago
http://searchco.de/ http://searchco.de/
antimora 15y ago
Oh no, not the code search!
suivix 15y ago
Google's profit margins greatly exceeded expectations for the last quarter[1]. In response they are shutting down Code Search? [1]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/google-reports-strong-earnings-topping-expectations.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/google-reports-...
alanh 15y ago
Why I expected Buzz to be a failure, based on a cursory UX analysis & comparison with existing social products: http://alanhogan.com/buzz-is-already-dead http://alanhogan.com/buzz-is-already-dead (Feb. 2010)
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
Headline should be: Search company shuts down search product to focus on social networking. I suppose their Blog Search is next.
antimora 15y ago
Really? "Google's mission is to organize the world's information" How is so when code search is going away? Google did excellent job at indexing the code, so why to throw away what's already working?
- Raphael 15y ago
  Maybe they don't believe in the Lisp notion that code is data.
sx 15y ago
At Pattern Insight (http://patterninsight.com http://patterninsight.com) we have build a source code search engine. We do not give this to our customers as a standalone tool most of the time but it's the underlying technology for our product, Code Assurance, which helps companies eliminate bugs from their releases. We use it internally to search our code / libraries, if anyone is interested in indexing/searching his own code, especially if it's open source, I would be happy to provide a copy. Email: spiros at patterninsight.com
BrandonM 15y ago
Louis CK (you might know him from the popular "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy" video) frequently appears on Opie & Anthony. He makes a similar point regarding chains driving out local stores then closing up shop in this show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N95IMKRkcBw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N95IMKRkcBw
madmath 15y ago
I could see a product similar to code search being integrated into services like github and others. Code search wasn't perfect, it basically just searched code. What if you had a product that could, like an IDE, follow method declarations and the like? That'd be cool.
acpmasquerade 15y ago
If Google can't backup the resources required for Code-Search, then who will ? Just googled to see if any other code search service is available. It listed one more result other than the Google Code Search. Will koders.com remain alive. It will probably be a single. Lets hope, there will be someone backing up Koders.
- skb 15y ago
  Yes, Koders is here to stay and will be relaunched with several improvements in near future. Meanwhile if you have suggestions/wishlist of improvements, you are welcome to leave a comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132462 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132462
johnx123-up 15y ago
Anyone knows the reason? I thought that it's their robot working hard (no human resources allotted for it)
jonutzz 15y ago
That makes me sad. I use it a lot!
iam 15y ago
Great. Now what are we supposed to use to search code? I can't think of any alternatives.
JabavuAdams 15y ago
Damn. I'll miss Code Search.

318 points by thisisblurry 15y ago

Speaking of focus, we went from "Organizing Worlds Information" ==> "Organizing People in to Circles" Indeed exciting times!

bdonlan 15y ago

It's too bad about code search - that was really helpful for finding example code (and linking to specific snippets of code within open-source projects!)

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

kpozin 15y ago

This is awful. Code Search is an indispensable tool for finding reference code and real-world uses of various libraries. I don't know of anything on par with it.

gojomo 15y ago
I'm not familiar enough with either to know if they are of equal power, but an alternative to Google Code Search might be Krugle open-source search: http://opensearch.krugle.org http://opensearch.krugle.org
simonw 15y ago
GitHub search is pretty good - it only searches code that's been hosted (or mirrored) on GitHub, but that's a LOT of code.
- nene 15y ago
  IMHO Github code search totally sucks. It's better than nothing, but it feels like the bare minimum - just a normal fulltext index applied to source code. - It's not case-sensitive, which sucks for searching code. - It's unable to search for any punctuation characters (searching for "foo()" is the same as searching for "foo"), which totally sucks for searching source code. - The search finds lots and lots of duplicates. Even multiple matches in one file are listed as completely separate results. - You can limit the search to one of the languages in dropdown menu, but if your language of choice doesn't happen to be in there, you're out of luck. For example you can't limit your search only to C header files. Simply by adding package:github.com to Google Code Search search box one can apply a better tool for code in github, but unfortunately the good times seem to be over soon. Really sad to see it go...

CJefferson 15y ago

I'm very disappointed to see google code search go. It was very useful (for me at least, don't read this as a comment on the whole committee / process) in finishing the new C++ standard, and answering the question "Well, did anyone ever really write code like X?" (the answer was usually yes). Buzz makes a lot of sense, although I imagine some users will be disappointed it couldn't be more 'cleanly' imported into google+.

icefox 15y ago
Same here on google code. I have used it on multiple occasions to find out how users are using a class or API to get a feel for what API was actually used for. Not to mention when learning a new API having the ability to see real world usage was always helpful. Not to mention the ease of finding apps that had security issues in codebases after it was found. Anyone know of a replacement for this?
- mapleoin 15y ago
  Well github's code search is a pretty good replacement, although it's limited to github.
  - geraldalewis 15y ago
    GitHub's code search lacks regular expressions, which makes it far less useful than Google Code Search.
perlgeek 15y ago
I also found the code search very useful, and usually used it to answer a similar question: does anybody use a Perl feature that is about to change (due to a bug fix, for example) or for which changes were proposed. I didn't use it all that often, but when I did, I was very grateful for having it.
zackb 15y ago
Did they give a reason for shutting down code search? I didn't see it but think it deserves some kind of explanation of the decision.

lithiumn 15y ago

Hate to see code search go. I always found it useful when having problems with some less-well documented libraries to see how they were used in the real world.

mcfunley 15y ago

I used code search just yesterday. Super lame.

spiffistan 15y ago

There's a competitor to google code search at least: http://www.koders.com/ http://www.koders.com/ Actually, I'm kinda glad they're phasing stuff out. It shows courage to do that, a lesson probably hard learned at google. They have a myriad of products, but would probably do much better with them if they thoroughly finished them before release.

joebadmo 15y ago
Yes, one of the things Larry Page talked about in the earnings call yesterday was aggressive project pruning and focus. I agree that this is a good sign of Page's leadership.
- frossie 15y ago
  The danger lies in being a company with a reputation of launching stuff and then not sticking with them. At some point that starts harming adoption levels of new products. Edit to comment below: "Trying and failing is a far better outcome than never having tried at all" is a great mantra for individuals or even small startups, but I am not sure how it applies here. I am still bitter over Google abandoning Notebook (which I was quite a heavy user of) and canning Calendar Public Search (search!!). I then reluctantly allowed my team to use Wave, only to have that one canned after building a process around it. No, it is not better for me that they tried and changed their minds (they did NOT "fail" technically), because I could have picked another product at the time that did intend to stick around. People look at Google, with all the money and people that it has, and ask "How much could it POSSIBLY cost to keep Code Search going? How is it possible that Google can't afford it?". The only answer I can come up with is (1) It can afford it (2) But it doesn't care to. So sure, if you are happy to see Google launch stuff that it has no commitment to, great for you. I'm having better luck taking chances with startups and their products. At least they have skin in the game. Edit #2: @joebadmo - but that is exactly what I think when I see a new Google product - "will it reach such large levels of adoption so that Google will keep it". And I keep getting it wrong - even for products like Wave and Code Search which I thought surely they are used internally and so will be kept around if only because of that - nope, either they are not used internally (if not, why not?) or even that is not protection enough. Sure, startups and small-person concerns are also risky propositions, but let's not forget the numbers. 100,000 users are a "failure" for google, but they are a wild success for a small startup, at least the ones not looking for a big exit. If you inlcude app writers as "startups", their longevity is phenomenal - I have never had an app stop working on me because somebody turned a sever off somewhere. Perhaps I have been freakishly lucky. The only other product I have had to stop using because it was pulled was wesabe.com.

dustingetz 15y ago

buzz was awesome for link sharing via a bookmarklet to my professional audience (compare to facebook bookmarklet for life stuff). plus isn't there yet -- plus doesn't expose RSS feeds to work with my audience's existing workflows. damn. any word on a plus RSS api? i want my stream, and i want my +1 feed. i was looking into the +1 stream yesterday, seems like google made it as hard as possible to hit from javascript -- nonstandard http post, no JSONP = i don't know if its possible to do client-side. damn x2.

freshlog 15y ago
Hey dustingetz, You might like to take a look at Handpick: http://handpick.me http://handpick.me You'll be able to create different groups of people to collect links for via a bookmarklet throughout the day and send them via a single email at the end of the day.
nl 15y ago
https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/list https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/list It returns JSON (and you need to OAuth it), but it gives the stream info you are after. https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/search https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/activities/search (with your name) is useful too.

mahmoudimus 15y ago

I'm actually really surprised that code search is getting phased off. It's a great resource to see how libraries are implemented in the wild -- it also exposes some common errors that lots of library authors make. So sad to see this one go -- but I think it will make for another opportunity to allow a competing site like koders.com to iterate on building a product that developers would love to use...I hope.

seltzered_ 15y ago

does this mean google reader sharing now goes to plus? Me and a close group of friends use google reader a lot for sharing and commenting, personally more than i ever use plus or facebook. sharing on google reader also shared on google buzz as well though.

joebadmo 15y ago
My friend group is the same, but this was always annoying because Buzz didn't go back into Greader. So I had one friend who would post to Buzz instead of Reader, but I would miss his posts unless I actually went to the Buzz interface, where I would still have to wade through all the Reader shared stuff. I'm glad it's all moving to +. I can only assume that sharing from Reader will be connected to + at some point. There's currently a workaround for this, but it's ugly.
jgavris 15y ago
i also liked buzz for bringing reader shares / comments into my inbox / buzz feed...i think the value of buzz was underestimated. i hope google brings the same integrations to google+. external sites were the bomb!

EGreg 15y ago

I can understand about Google Buzz ... they are replacing it with Google+. But what about Code Search? It's like they mention it once, and then don't give a reason. I think that was useful for many people! I wonder why they are closing it...

tlogan 15y ago

What is the best alternative to Google Code Search?

pbreit 15y ago
http://www.koders.com http://www.koders.com or http://opensearch.krugle.org http://opensearch.krugle.org
- tlogan 15y ago
  Thanks. It seems like these two options are way behind Google Search. Maybe there is opportunity here to build a pay service for developers (like to find implementation patterns, common bugs, etc.). Anyway, I just want to express my disbelief with this google decision: Google is synonym for search. All kind of searches. Meaning if Google cannot provide good search for open source code then something is terribly wrong. When can say everything about Google and some failures of Google, but they are very very good in search. And, they want to be around for next 15 years, they must not lose on that front (even if it is just "open source search"). Anyway, I hope DuckDuckGo or some other search engine will try to do something here...
daliusd 15y ago
Recently I have found out that google search "function/class/variable/anything else filetype:extension" works even better than google code search.
- reinhardt 15y ago
  I don't know how well does code search work for searching punctuation but I'm sure general web search doesn't cut it.
  - uriel 15y ago
    Code Search allows using regexps for searching, which is one of the things that made it super awesome.
15y ago

ch 15y ago

Sad to see Code Search go. I just tried a simple search for 'pthread_t' on both Koders (http://www.koders.com http://www.koders.com) and Krugle (http://opensearch.krugle.org http://opensearch.krugle.org). Both are mentioned elsewhere in the comments as possible alternatives. Krugle found no results. Koders found results, but the response time was very large. Both have a long way to go in being a viable Code Search replacement. Hopefully Code Search just gets rolled into the primary Google search product. NOTE: I was just looking over the Koders results. It is tokenizing 'pthread_t' as 'pthread' 't', so the top results are not what I would consider useful. I'm sure I can change some settings to get proper tokenization for my languages identifiers, but that is more work up front.

Uhhrrr 15y ago
Double quotes seem to stop it from tokenizing, e.g. "pthread_t".
- ch 15y ago
  Yes, but in a code search engine it would make sense to not break words that are valid symbols in more programming languages than not. It's all about sensible defaults.
  - gtani 15y ago
    There's a lot of significance in function/method signatures and non-alphanum chars that google is getting to grips with (and hoogle/hayoo for haskell seems to be state of the art). Ruby Class#method, the (dozens or more) symbolic "operators" in scala, haskell, ocaml (which are generally functions, not operators). I think it's up to each language community to build those tools now.

pbreit 15y ago

I'm surprised about the Code Search news. That seems to be squarely within Google's mission.

jrockway 15y ago
How do you sell ads on a bunch of code results? That's the only logical explanation I see for shutting this down. I find a globally-searchable database of code useful enough to want to rewrite this myself. I won't get all of the Internet, but if I can get Github and GNU / Apache / etc., it will be enough.
- pbreit 15y ago
  i"ve only thought about it for about 30 seconds but it would seem to be the absolute best place to post engineering job ads.
  - VladRussian 15y ago
    interesting source code centric adwords can be imagined here - bidding on specific language, api, library, product :)
  - mongol 15y ago
    Also - ads for e-books perhaps. If you end up looking at Hibernate code, you are struggling with Hibernate. Why not clicking on "Hibernate In Action"?

kingkilr 15y ago

No! I loved code search, I'd use it as evidence when proposing the deprecation of API methods in open source projects :)

chaosmachine 15y ago

Google Code Search has been pretty broken (for my use case, anyway) for a while. I build Drupal Code Search[1] on top of their API back in 2008, and a few months later, they stopped indexing code from Drupal.org. Since then, 2 new versions of Drupal (6 and 7) have been released, and none of the new code has been indexed, making my site largely useless except for legacy code searches. I guess I will just shut it down completely come 2012, I don't have any way to do grep-style searches at the same speed Google's API could. [1] http://drupalcodesearch.com/ http://drupalcodesearch.com/

jjwiseman 15y ago
Was it broken in some way other than it didn't index drupal.org?
- bartl 15y ago
  Drupal.org most likely was not the only site they no longer indexed. Probably no code site was still being indexed, at all.

siddhant 15y ago

Buzz is fine. But what was wrong with Code Search?

plq 15y ago

i don't understand why codesearch has to go. granted, it felt a bit neglected lately, but it was truly useful. i wish there was a way for google to open source their abandoned projects. i'm sure someone would be willing to offer a similar service by basing it what the google code search already does.

kpanghmc 15y ago

Does anyone know what they mean by this? "we will remove iGoogle's social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are." Are they referring to Google Chat or are they referring to iGoogle widgets that have "social features" (e.g. Twitter widgets, Facebook widgets, etc.)?

abraham 15y ago
Some gadgets have social features so interact with friends who also use the same gadget. For example there could be a gadget that lets you search for and watch YouTube videos and friends you allow can see what videos you watched. Those gadgets are going away. You Chat will still be there and gadgets that interact with third-party social sites will still be there too.

rockerarj 15y ago

That's what I really like about Google. A company with too many products just hanging in there making losses is a company with a low morale. I think accepting the loss and shutting down low performance products is very important.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

saurik 15y ago

So, in 2005 I was involved in a company that thought "man, it would be great to build a search engine for source code". I even started putting together components for it, such as a model for finding text inside of larger documents that had statistical properties similar to code, auto-detecting the language, so you could find code snippets inside of blog posts. However, by the time we got organized enough to actually do it, Google Code launched, and had this really awesome code searching feature, that everyone considered to be "more than good enough" and "comprehensive, as Google is indexing the hell out of stuff like this". But, now, Google has now determined that that wasn't sustainable, and has shut down the project. Which means that both our company, and any other company, that thought it had a sustainable model for running such a project, and at this point would probably be "pretty awesome", never started, and we are all suddenly thrust back into 2005, unable to search for code. This... (I now emphatically point at the previous paragraphs) is why I don't like Google very much: they have such large resources available to them that they tend to just swoop in and offer an unsustainable service at a loss, training users that "things should be so free it hurts: in fact, they must be losing money on every use of this" (Google Voice being a great example), thereby stifling innovation by people who can't possibly undercut that. Note: this isn't even a problem specific to Google... startup companies that get VC money tend to also cause this problem. They get tons of money, offer a service at a heavy loss while they use that burn time to determine a business model, actively knowing that they are operating at a loss in order to get users as fast as possible from other people who might try to get them. Of course, the result is that the company usually either totally implodes (typical of any startup) or, even more insidiously (for the projects that actually becoming successful, even quite popular / common), come up with a business model so ludicrous that the users actively revolt against the entire concept of the service... ... and, where do they go? To some other free service offered by another company that managed to get equally large sums of VC money because they point at that other company that had hundreds of millions of users that just failed because of a bad business model, something they will know how to fix (in a couple years or so, once they get around to figuring that part out...). :( I liked Google Code search, and I'm going to miss it.

joebadmo 15y ago
Which means that both our company, and any other company, that thought it had a sustainable model for running such a project, and at this point would probably be "pretty awesome", never started, and we are all suddenly thrust back into 2005, unable to search for code. I see two viable reactions to this: 1. There's now a vacuum where Code Search was, and, evidently, some demand. Why not startup now? 2. Not even Google could find a viable model for Code Search, even with their resources and scale, and (ugh) synergy. Google did the research for me. (And if you think Google dropped it because they couldn't find a viable free model, and you think there's a viable paid model, see #1.) As for startups, the phenomenon you describe seems to apply mostly to things that depend on network effect and probably advertising. If you have an idea that brings value to someone and can demonstrate a sustainable business model based on charging for that value, I would imagine that to be a much more attractive option for people who want something they can depend on than a VC funded free product startup.

heydenberk 15y ago

I liked Buzz's idea of integrating a social inbox with the an email inbox, and in particular I liked Reader integration with Buzz. If Google doesn't integrate Reader and Gmail with Plus more effectively, I'll be spending _less_ time being social with Google than before.

ajays 15y ago

I may be biased, but: I feel like Google's "geek cred" is slipping. It feels like PMs (and their "monetization strategies") are gaining control over at El Goog, shutting down anything that isn't "revenue positive". You can't measure geek cred. You can't measure the second-order effect of services like Code Search. So the slow slide of Google turning into "just another tech company" starts...

sixtofour 15y ago
"You can't measure geek cred. You can't measure the second-order effect of services like Code Search." And so as a publicly owned, regulated, billion dollar corporation, it no longer make sense to commit unmeasured resources to support unmeasurable benefits.
- ajays 15y ago
  Every day companies like Google and Yahoo do things which don't have a directly measurable benefit. Why does Yahoo put out YUI, Hadoop, YTS for free? Why does Google give out protobufs, GWT for free? Why are there public tech talks at these companies? Can you quantify the benefit of such activities?
- dasil003 15y ago
  What do you mean unmeasured resources? Look, I admit that you can't make good business decisions on Google's scale without using the data. That, however, is not Google's problem. It's also important to have vision and principles that everyone in the company understands, otherwise it's impossible to keep thousands of employees moving in the same direction. It would be very easy for Larry to make a decision like: "One of our core values is to put engineering first, this makes us a place where the smartest engineers want to work, and keeping Google Code around is a strong external indicator of this, therefore we should spend $1,000,000/year maintaining it regardless of profits." Despite the lack of data you could not fault a CEO for making a gut call like that. Just because you can't measure something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
  - sixtofour 15y ago

heydenberk 15y ago

Also: there will always be people decrying Google's tendency to launch and phase out new products and there will always be people decrying its reticence to try new things even if they fail, and they're probably doing a good job if they're attracting roughly equal amounts of these responses.

boomboom 15y ago

boom

sdfjkl 15y ago

I wouldn't miss Code search much if the regular Google search would understand regular expressions or terms with underscores. But it does not, and also increasingly annoys me by misinterpreting my search terms and searching for the things it believes I meant instead of the things I told it to search for. And while DuckDuckGo has a much nicer search frontend, it's Bing-fed index sadly sucks, making it no universal replacement for Google's declining frontend.

blauwbilgorgel 15y ago

Very saddened to see 'University Research Program for Google Search' go. Google's index offers an exciting corpus for linguistics and AI study. The current search API's just don't cut it for proper research (for example: just 64 results per query and 1000 queries a day [1] and the "estimatedResultCount" being off by a factor of 10-100 [2]). I believe spammers were abusing the Google translate API to spin articles in different languages. This contributed to it being closed down. I don't hope that Google's search API is crippled to thwart the bad apples. Because then those that follow the TOS (don't crawl Google's results) have little recourse, but to halt their research (Yahoo Boss and Bing Api give little solace). [1] Too few for either deep analysis or learning queries like: "X is a *" and "X, such as *," [2] Estimated results for "test". With API: 257.000.000 vs. manual search 2.750.000.000

shriphani 15y ago
Would this help in any way? http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/focus/cs/web-ngram.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/focus/cs/w...
pandeiro 15y ago
Off topic but in response to your conjecture about the Google Translate API: My own is that they are protecting against the harvesting of their AI algorithm's output.

lost-theory 15y ago

Nullege is still great search engine for python code. http://nullege.com/ http://nullege.com/

cygwin98 15y ago

I hope Google open source the code behind Code Search. They don't have to release all supporting libraries that are specific to Google's infrastructure though. Such that those of us who actually use the service can figure out a scaled-down implementation to serve ourselves.

tambourine_man 15y ago

It never worked all that well for me. What I want is a "curl | grep" for the web. Just something that searches the entire page, including <head> <!--> etc. I can do without fancy semantics. But Google tries to be smart even on quoted queries. And that annoys me deeply.

Donald 15y ago
>But Google tries to be smart even on quoted queries. And that annoys me deeply. They're just trying to redirect you to more profitable (i.e., a greater probability that you will impress an ad) search queries.

saibotd 15y ago

http://searchco.de/ http://searchco.de/

antimora 15y ago

Oh no, not the code search!

suivix 15y ago

Google's profit margins greatly exceeded expectations for the last quarter[1]. In response they are shutting down Code Search? [1]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/google-reports-strong-earnings-topping-expectations.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/google-reports-...

alanh 15y ago

Why I expected Buzz to be a failure, based on a cursory UX analysis & comparison with existing social products: http://alanhogan.com/buzz-is-already-dead http://alanhogan.com/buzz-is-already-dead (Feb. 2010)

MatthewPhillips 15y ago

Headline should be: Search company shuts down search product to focus on social networking. I suppose their Blog Search is next.

antimora 15y ago

Really? "Google's mission is to organize the world's information" How is so when code search is going away? Google did excellent job at indexing the code, so why to throw away what's already working?

Raphael 15y ago
Maybe they don't believe in the Lisp notion that code is data.

sx 15y ago

At Pattern Insight (http://patterninsight.com http://patterninsight.com) we have build a source code search engine. We do not give this to our customers as a standalone tool most of the time but it's the underlying technology for our product, Code Assurance, which helps companies eliminate bugs from their releases. We use it internally to search our code / libraries, if anyone is interested in indexing/searching his own code, especially if it's open source, I would be happy to provide a copy. Email: spiros at patterninsight.com

BrandonM 15y ago

Louis CK (you might know him from the popular "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy" video) frequently appears on Opie & Anthony. He makes a similar point regarding chains driving out local stores then closing up shop in this show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N95IMKRkcBw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N95IMKRkcBw

madmath 15y ago

I could see a product similar to code search being integrated into services like github and others. Code search wasn't perfect, it basically just searched code. What if you had a product that could, like an IDE, follow method declarations and the like? That'd be cool.

acpmasquerade 15y ago

If Google can't backup the resources required for Code-Search, then who will ? Just googled to see if any other code search service is available. It listed one more result other than the Google Code Search. Will koders.com remain alive. It will probably be a single. Lets hope, there will be someone backing up Koders.

skb 15y ago
Yes, Koders is here to stay and will be relaunched with several improvements in near future. Meanwhile if you have suggestions/wishlist of improvements, you are welcome to leave a comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132462 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132462

johnx123-up 15y ago

Anyone knows the reason? I thought that it's their robot working hard (no human resources allotted for it)

jonutzz 15y ago

That makes me sad. I use it a lot!

iam 15y ago

Great. Now what are we supposed to use to search code? I can't think of any alternatives.

JabavuAdams 15y ago

Damn. I'll miss Code Search.