Ask HN: Devs, what does “search engine for code” mean to you?

Sounds like a buzzword to me.

Now, if someone implemented an index of code that was based on something like Brenda S. Baker's "On Finding Duplication and Near-Duplication in Large Software Systems ", https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.133..., maybe that would be interesting.

I believe Baker's work only did C source code, you'd have to have different parsers for different languages to redo her "dupe" program for a useful "search engine for code", but it would be valuable.

Brenda Baker's "Parameterized Pattern Matching" https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=227487 appears to be a precursor to the "On Finding Duplication..." paper.

a search engine for a single project, or for multiple projects?

I use opengrok and the grep command.

I want fuzzy matching, as sometimes, I don't know the exact spelling.