Searching Sourcecode Across the 'Net

sites

I’ve seen a couple of people mentioning the Koders Source Code Search Engine recently and I decided I should have a little play. The idea is pretty simple, they spider source code from projects across the net and then allow you to search through the gathered code.

While I’ve not played with it enough to know if it’s going to be of any interest to me in smaller projects a couple of things did stick out when I tried the site.

  1. No meta-data reduces the value of the results.
  2. It requires you to escape :'s. Searching for Perl without realizing that isn't very productive ;)
  3. If the results span one or more pages then the page selector is both small and in an awkward place.

Will people use it? I don’t know but it’s worth keeping an eye on.