Advertisement
Promo

Network management Toolkit

Google gives developers code-search capabilities

Martin LaMonica CNET News.com

Published: 05 Oct 2006 09:50 BST

  • Email
  • Trackback
  • Clip Link
  • Print friendly
  • Post Comment

Google is taking its search expertise to one of its favourite audiences: software developers.

On Thursday the company is expected to launch a Web site, Google Code Search, which the company says will let programmers search billions of lines of code.

The service, conceived by the Google Labs early technology group, will crawl publicly available code, most of which is made available through open source projects. The search and indexing can cover code on Web pages as well as code that resides in compressed files, said Tom Stocky, a product manager at Google.

Google expects that the search engine will be used primarily as a learning tool to help students and serious programmers, rather than a way to find and copy another person's code.

"Most of the code is open source so you can reuse it. But I don't think that's the primary use — it's more about how to learn about things and, when you're building open source packages, to make sure you doing it the right way," Stocky said.

For example, a developer may need to write a function as part of an application and search the Web to see other examples.

Google engineers, many of whom participate in open source projects, already use these code-searching capabilities internally. Since it is a Google Labs project, the company is not yet seeking to monetise searches through ads, Stocky said.

The search engine will allow people to do both keyword search and "regular expressions", which allow people to search a specified pattern, he said. For example, a person could narrow search to JavaScript functions, which will help find more examples, Stocky said.

As it does with many of its services, Google will release an application programming interface (API) to create an XML feed based on a specific query.

Although it doesn't sell programming tools, Google has an active developer outreach programme and relies on third-party programmers to enhance its services.

For example, developers have created popular mashup applications that display information from one Web site using its Google Maps service.

"More and more (the developer community) is the way Google products are getting to scale. We think developers can really improve Google products and use Google technology to improve their own products," he said.

  • Email
  • Trackback
  • Clip Link
  • Print friendly
  • Post Comment

Did you find this article useful?
427 out of 557 people found this useful


Full Talkback thread

0 comments

Company/Topic Alerts

Create a new alert from the list below:





Video icon

Video

On The Road Blog

O2 to carry Samsung's i7500 Android ph...

Samsung's first Android handset, the i7500, has appeared in O2's in-house magazine, and a spokesperson for the operator confirmed to ZDNet UK on Monday that the handset will be carried... More

Post a comment

Nokia Android rumours earn outright de...

Nokia has strongly denied working on an Android-based handset, following a report early on Monday that it was planning to do so. The report, carried in The Guardian, took a cue from... More

Post a comment

Behind the Scenes: Next Gen Mobile Tec...

Behind the Scenes: Next Gen Mobile Technology Author: Eric Everson, Founder MyMobiSafe.com With infrastructure speeds continually improving at the network level of the world’s leading... More

Post a comment


Skip Sub Navigation Links to CNET Brand Links

Help

Become part of the ZDNet community.

Newsletters