Replacement for Google Code Search? [closed]

Question

Google Code Search has been incredibly valuable to me as a developer - I use it a couple times a week to see how other developers have used (usually poorly documented) APIs. It's also convenient to see the internals of some of those APIs, or to find which API corresponds to the functionality you want (it's a great resource for Android in particular -- give it some of the text you see on screen, and it'll usually find the implementing class).

Now that Google shutting down code search as of January 15, 2012, are there any good replacements?

Equipotential

As of 2013/03/07 it seems that code.google.com/codesearch is finally shutdown (now for real). Just a few days ago it was still reachable and usable, now above url returns a page 404 error. RIP codesearch. But koders is indeed a good alternative. – Hagi

Try GitHub Search at github.com/search – Palpable

The creator of codesearch released a detailed article about how it all worked and the source is available here. Apparently, this can be run on one machine! Hopefully, this will get stood up by someone, somewhere, soon... – Fcc

what about cocycles.com- it works with javascript and it's the only engine to understand functionality, so you can simply search for things like "hash map" or "parse headers" and find full implementations, docs, usage examples and more. – Erleneerlewine

I know this is an older thread, but now there's also exemplator.xyz which finds example usages for Java code (unfortunately only Java right now) - but it works well! – Gearing

check out codegrep.com – Harrier

Answer 1

Take a look at these:

• searchcode

• krugle

Penmanship

Open Hub Code Search has now been discontinued, but Sourcegraph lets you search for code and see how other coders are calling/using libraries. (I'm affiliated with Sourcegraph.) – Nerveracking

Answer 2

I have reviewed the following sites

The good

• Krugle
• searchcode

The broken or unsuitable

• Antepedia (site is only a "We'll be back soon" page because Antepedia has been acquired)

The dead

• Koders (discontinued)
• SymbolHound Code Search
• GrepCode (only Java)
• SymbolHound (generic search engine, not just code)
• Codefetch (unreachable as of 2016-08-23)
• Codase (discontinued)

When I originally did the review, Koders turned out to be the winner for my purposes, but I really liked the user interface and features of SymbolHound Code Search better. The only problem with SymbolHound was the small number of sites it has indexed. The search[code] engine was also promising at that time.

Many of the sites I've reviewed have since been discontinued completely or have disabled their code search functionality. Krugle and search[code] seem to be chugging along, and GrepCode is good if you live in the Java world.

Lisa

Koders is no longer available. – Teyde

@akaihola, Are they all based on the same data source? Is there any point in using multiples of them? – Wolford

So, what do you consider the 'winner' now that Koders is discontinued? – Katzenjammer

@Pacerier, it seems that there are some differences in data sources, and each site does their own indexing. – Lisa

@RastaJedi, only Krugle and search[code] work for my needs. Krugle has better code browsing, and search[code] feels to have a smarter code matching engine. – Lisa

@akihola Thank you for the kind words about searchcode :) Hoping to improve on the breadth and depth of it over the next year. – River

Answer 3

Another one to consider is http://searchcode.com/ It supports regex search as Google Code search does. For example,

http://searchco.de/?q=/[cb]at/
http://searchco.de/?q=/a{2,3}/
http://searchco.de/?q=/^import/
http://searchco.de/?q=/atoi/%20ext:c
http://searchco.de/?q=/dll$/

Are all valid searches.

River

Seems that regex is not supported anymore? :/ – Kyle

Nobody used it to be honest. I may bring it back after I convert the code over in time. – River

Answer 4

There is http://opensearch.krugle.org

Fart

Nice user interface but I get poor results for C# code. Seems to have a small number of sites indexed. – Vshaped