ResearchBuzz

Plenty of search engines that find code are popping up on my radar lately. The latest one is AlltheCode, which is in alpha at http://www.allthecode.com/ . The engine notes in its FAQ that “Unlike similar source code search engines, All The Code considers the relation between code and uses this to help judge the relevance.” At the moment it only offers Java code search, and doesn’t plan a beta version until late 2007 or early 2008.

(Also noted in the FAQ: there’s currently now way to submit code, and new languages will be added to the search engine this summer.)

I did a simple search for xml parser. I got 247 results, with the caveat on the results page that I was getting only results based on a nonfuzzy search. With that warning was an invitation to do a fuzzy search. When I did I got 946 results, so there’s quite a results. Results included a URL and substantial code snippets. Clicking on the URL actually doesn’t move you offsite. Instead AlltheCode has the code on its own site, with a pointer to the original code.

The founder’s blog is available at http://blog.holdenkarau.com/ and has some updates on the search engine with plenty of geeky backstage peeking.

If you’ve ever tried to search Google for code you know it can be a pain. There are several special characters that Google doesn’t recognize, sometimes it seems like Google’s looking in every place except where you want to look, and Google’s syntax don’t always work well in narrowing down your search for code.

Enter Krugle. Krugle, at http://www.krugle.com/, is a search engine specifically designed to find code, with several ways to narrow down your searches.

Krugle functions as a query box with a series of drop-down menus. Enter a query, then choose the language for which you want to search (JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, C++, etc. There’s also an “all” choice) and where you want to find the query string (comments, source code, function call, etc.) You can also specify a particular project (more about that in a minute.)

I did a search for Perl files containing the word Excel in the comments (trying to answer the question “How are people using Excel and Perl?”) I got 763 results, listed in groups of ten. Results included a snippet, file name, and the domain from which the information came.

In addition to the code tab (where you can do these code searches), there are two other tabs as well. There’s a Tech Pages tab, which searches for documentation, tutorials, etc. (Searching for Spreadsheet::WriteExcel got me over 125 pointers to information, including tutorials, general information pages, and a wiki or two. Unfortunately it also brought back some cruft like lists of Perl modules installed at hosting companies.) There’s also a projects page; enter a query string and get all projects which match that string (searching for Excel here found 30 projects, including a couple I’m going to have to look at further…..)

If you’re not much into programming, skip the code search and see what the Projects and Tech Pages tabs have to offer. There’s a little bit of searchgunk, especially in the Tech Pages results, but it’s easily avoided. I could spend a lot of time here…