How Google Code Search Worked
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How Google Code Search Worked
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: How Google Code Search Worked
#2And here I had always thought Google Code Search was based on some kind of fancy federated radix-tree. Very nice design Russ.
Re: How Google Code Search Worked
#3I sometimes wonder whether Russ Cox is actually human or is in fact a collective pen name for a group of very talented hackers :)
Re: How Google Code Search Worked
#4I sometimes wonder whether Russ Cox is actually human or is in fact a collective pen name for a group of very talented hackers :)
You're not alone. I like to think of him as 'Future japan prize winner Russ Cox'
Re: How Google Code Search Worked
#5This is the most awesome kind of solution: built off of few mostly-off-the-shelf moving parts, simple and easy to understand, and entirely perfect for the problem at hand. This write-up would be awesome teaching material for anyone moving from "I know how to write a program" to "how do I build a clean, elegant system to solve a specific problem?"
Re: How Google Code Search Worked
#6It's a nice design (in particular Trigram Index), but overall product still failed.
My guess is that regular expression search is not as useful as full-text search that general Google Search does.
Re: How Google Code Search Worked
#7Interesting solution. I did something a little different for searchco.de when I was implementing regex search.
Essentially I took the regex such as [cb]at and then expand it out to get all of the terms, in this case cat and bat and then do a standard fulltex search based on those terms to get as close a match as possible. I then loop over the results to get back those which are exact matches.
Its actually more complex then that but with some other trickery (infix and prefix indexing) but it works reasonably well although I am still ironing out some kinks.
Re: How Google Code Search Worked
#8To be fair, the reason Perl, Python and PCRE (which all use pretty much the same regex syntax) don't use the linear-time algorithms is because they can't. Features like look-around and matching what you've already matched (/(\w+) \1/ to find repeated words for example) give you more expressivity than regular languages, but also takes away linear time algorithms.
Re: How Google Code Search Worked
#9It's a nice design (in particular Trigram Index), but overall product still failed. My guess is that regular expression search is not as useful as full-text search that general Google Search does.
Finding code with the regular Google Search is nearly impossible though.
Re: How Google Code Search Worked
#10Google made a mistake in killing code search. Indexing the world's source code and making it searchable is so obviously part of their core mission that I wonder how this decision even got made.
Yeah, code search is a niche market numerically speaking, but intellectually and economically (considering the economic impact of software) it is vital. Google was doing so much better a job of it than anybody else that they completely owned the space. How could that not be worth what it cost them to run it? And now we are bereft of anything good.
I used to use Google Code Search like this: encounter an unfamiliar language or API construct, go to code search, get page after page of real-world usages. Or like this: wonder how to do X, imagine what code that does X might say, search for snippets of that until hitting a working example of X. It was a powerful learning device that I am sad to lose. I sure hope a startup comes along to get search right for the world's source code. Github ought to, but their search sucks.
In any case, congratulations Russ Cox et. al. on a brilliant piece of work.