Favorite Code Search Engines

Posted: February 10, 2007

Being only slightly technical, I like to use code search engines to find examples that are being implemented or help files without the clutter of non-relevant sites.

Here are my favorite code search engines:

http://www.allthecode.com - This one is good for java and some more technical code. It’s not great for finding example code on webpages.

http://www.google.com/codesearch - This is one of my favorites for finding onpage code.

http://www.krugle.com - Allows you to search for code by specific language. Sometimes I don’t find what I’m looking for, especially when it’s onpage.

http://www.koders.com - This one seems to be the most complete as far as finding information. However, sometimes it can be clunky to use as the UI isn’t always intuitive.

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Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Search Engines

Comments

3 Responses to “Favorite Code Search Engines”

Ken Krugler on February 11th, 2007 10:41 pm

Hi Brad,

Thanks for taking the time to do a comparison. I’m curious about two things you mention above…

1. What does “onpage code” mean? I thought you were talking about code on a web page, but in that case Google code search won’t find it, or so I thought.

2. Any specific examples of searches that you mention where you felt that Koders provided the most complete results?

Thanks for any follow-up…we’re always interested in improving our search results.

– Ken
Brad Geddes aka eWhisper on February 11th, 2007 11:14 pm

Ken,

I probably didn’t go a good job of explaining ‘on page’. What I mean is the code being rendered to create a page (i.e. if I wanted to find examples of a wordpress plugin bSuite being used, I could search for ‘bSuite’ in Google and find the code. So, I suppose searching the ‘html’ of the page (although it could be php, java, etc) is where I find Google excels.

Where I don’t think it excels, and i like Krugle.com better is when searching for actual code examples; such as http://krugle.com/kse/codespaces/DyhHpq (the query was ‘mysql create tables with null values). Google’s snippets are all identical so it’s difficult to even see where first to click to find more info, and I don’t think it’s as relevant.

My thought is that Google has many more pages indexed, so if one is looking for examples of more basic java/html/php code that renders a page, Google is better. If one is looking for more advanced info (especially by language) than Krugle is better.
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