 | This article needs to beupdated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(December 2018) |
 | |
Type of site | Search engine |
|---|---|
| Available in | All languages |
| Owner | |
| URL | www.google.com/codesearch |
| Launched | October 5, 2006; 18 years ago (2006-10-05) |
| Current status | Discontinued as of 7 May 2025 |
Google Code Search was a freebeta product fromGoogle which debuted inGoogle 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, namelylang:,package:,license:, andfile:.
The code available for searching was in various formats including tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip,CVS,Subversion,git andMercurial 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 ofregular expressions in queries, which at that time was not offered by any other search engine for code.[citation needed] This makes it resemblegrep, but over the world's public code. The methodology employed, sometimes calledtrigram search, combines atrigramindex with a custom-built,denial-of-service resistantregular expression engine.[3]
In March 2010, the code ofRE2, 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 a404.
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]
