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I imagine this is on the front page due to Google code search going away. Since i'm currently working on a replacement this seems like as good a place as any to

by boyter 15y ago

I imagine this is on the front page due to Google code search going away. Since i'm currently working on a replacement this seems like as good a place as any to ask people what they are looking for. My list of required launch features are, 1. Regex search support. 2. Browse full file. 3. Filter search to single project. This is based on what I observed on the Reddit and HN discussions when it was announced. I can see from the below some people would like grouping of identical results which is fairly easy to add so no worries there. Any other thoughts?

troels 15y ago
Index by symbols. ctags would be a fine start.
- boyter 15y ago
  I have been wondering if that's actually required. Take for example the following search print_r During the indexing process it would take print and r as separate words. Any search for "print_r" should break up the same way, and assuming the search is phrase heavy return any document with "print_r" near the top anyway.
110101001010100 15y ago
I can envision a relatively easy way to implement this without writing lots of code. How big do you think the market is for internet-based "code search"? I think code search is very useful and I've come near to trying to construct a searchable database just for personal use. It's an itch I've been tempted to scratch. But it would require some time.
- boyter 15y ago
  Big enough for several projects to already exist, koders (and a few others I have forgotten the name of), but not big enough for it to be worth maintaining for Google. No idea what number to put to that, but I would image its less then 5 million users. So far I have mostly everything working, its just pulling down enough repo's to make it worthwhile.
JoshTriplett 15y ago
> 1. Regex search support. 2. Browse full file. 3. Filter search to single project. Regex search doesn't seem like a requirement here; for searching code, it usually suffices to include symbols when you index. Might also help to have some language-specific text classifiers, so you can say "search comments" or "search strings" or "search code". Browsing the full file seems quite important to check the results. For that, you'll want line numbers, per-line anchors, and basic highlighting support for popular languages, in order of priority. Filtering to a single project doesn't actually seem that helpful; if I know what project I want to search, I can clone it locally and grep it myself. Code search engines help with questions like "does anyone use this API?" or "how have other people processed the data from this library?", which need to search all projects. Filtering by language might help, though (to avoid problems with APIs provided in umpteen languages).

by boyter 15y ago

troels 15y ago

Index by symbols. ctags would be a fine start.

boyter 15y ago
I have been wondering if that's actually required. Take for example the following search print_r During the indexing process it would take print and r as separate words. Any search for "print_r" should break up the same way, and assuming the search is phrase heavy return any document with "print_r" near the top anyway.

110101001010100 15y ago

I can envision a relatively easy way to implement this without writing lots of code. How big do you think the market is for internet-based "code search"? I think code search is very useful and I've come near to trying to construct a searchable database just for personal use. It's an itch I've been tempted to scratch. But it would require some time.

boyter 15y ago
Big enough for several projects to already exist, koders (and a few others I have forgotten the name of), but not big enough for it to be worth maintaining for Google. No idea what number to put to that, but I would image its less then 5 million users. So far I have mostly everything working, its just pulling down enough repo's to make it worthwhile.

JoshTriplett 15y ago

> 1. Regex search support. 2. Browse full file. 3. Filter search to single project. Regex search doesn't seem like a requirement here; for searching code, it usually suffices to include symbols when you index. Might also help to have some language-specific text classifiers, so you can say "search comments" or "search strings" or "search code". Browsing the full file seems quite important to check the results. For that, you'll want line numbers, per-line anchors, and basic highlighting support for popular languages, in order of priority. Filtering to a single project doesn't actually seem that helpful; if I know what project I want to search, I can clone it locally and grep it myself. Code search engines help with questions like "does anyone use this API?" or "how have other people processed the data from this library?", which need to search all projects. Filtering by language might help, though (to avoid problems with APIs provided in umpteen languages).