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 | This article needs to be updated. (December 2018) |
Google Code Search was a free beta product from Google which debuted in Google Labs on October 5, 2006, allowing web users to search for open-source code on the Internet. Features included the ability to search using operators, namely lang:, package:, license:, and file:.
The code available for searching was in various formats including tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip, CVS, Subversion, git and Mercurial repositories.
Google Code Search covered many open-source projects, and as such is different from the "Code Search for Google Open source projects" that was released afterwards.[1][2]
The site allowed the use of regular expressions in queries, which at that time was not offered by any other search engine for code.[citation needed] This makes it resemble grep, but over the world's public code. The methodology employed, sometimes called trigram search, combines a trigram index with a custom-built, denial-of-service resistant regular expression engine.[3]
In March 2010, the code of RE2, the regular expression engine used in Google Code Search, was made open source.[4]
Google Code Search supported POSIX extended regular expression syntax, excluding back-references, collating elements, and collation classes.
Languages not officially supported could be searched for using the file: operator to match the common file extensions for the language.
In October 2011, Google announced that Code Search was to be shut down along with the Code Search API.[5] The service remained online until March 2013,[6] and it now returns a 404.
In January 2012, Google developer Russ Cox published an overview of history and the technical aspects of the tool, and open-sourced a basic implementation of a similar functionality as a set of standalone programs that can run fast indexed regular expression searches over local code.[7]
