Google Code Search team says Goodbye | Hacker News Reader

Google Code Search team says Goodbye

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79 pointscleverjake23 comments

It's worth pointing out that although the Google code search service is going away, RE2, the regular expression engine built for code search by Russ Cox, is open source (http://code.google.com/p/re2/). RE2 is also the basis for Go's regexp package (http://weekly.golang.org/pkg/regexp/).

See http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp3.html for the original writeup from Russ.

It wasn't just regex search that I loved Code Search for; it allowed search over functions, classes, etc. It also listed the functions defined in a file in a pane on the left. I wonder if they used a regex for that? It would be nice if they opensource that component as well.

> I wonder if they used a regex for that?

Not possible. You have to parse the file fully to extract that information; regular expressions aren't powerful enough.

It depends on what you mean by regex. Modern engines go beyond the capabilities of regular expression grammars, describing things that are not possible with a finite-state machine.

And for example, the regex engine from Perl 5.10 and up has had support for recursive patterns. See the faq: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq6.html#Can-I-use-Perl-regular...

And once you have recursion support, you can parse context-free languages.

What does rsc have to say to jwz about using regexes to match a language?

What's the problem using regexps for searching stuff? It's even quite common for lexing, it just gets ugly if try to parse stuff with it (brace matching etc.).

(And IIRC, the quote originated from a piece of code where jwz actually did use regexps quite a lot, if just to get enough performance out of elisp)

Interesting to see the note about ChromiumOS/Android...

"There is something of a silver lining. googlecode.com will take over search for their projects, and also take over hosting the Chromium search page. (If ChromiumOS or Android are important to you, reach out to whatever contacts you have at Google now and let them know!)There is something of a silver lining. googlecode.com will take over search for their projects, and also take over hosting the Chromium search page. (If ChromiumOS or Android are important to you, reach out to whatever contacts you have at Google now and let them know!)"

Does anyone know the reason for referencing Android and ChromiumOS in such a context? Surely they are not implying that Google's considering shutting those projects down. Are there perhaps some ChromiumOS/Android specific search systems?

edit: I assume they are referring to this http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#uX1GffpyOZk/core/ja...

http://codesearch.google.com/codesearch#&exact_package=c... is a specific instance of codesearch for Chrome code. It even cross-references code to its users/implementations, something that it doesn't do for other code.

Google Code Search is the only search engine that indexes GitHub repositories. I find that almost all open source projects are in GitHub in one way or another, and GH doesn't let you search the actual code

I use it, and I know other people do, to find software exploits. For eg. here is a search to find open source software that trusts the X-Forwarded-For HTTP request header:

http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=%22X_FORWARDE...

http://koders.com/default.aspx?s=%22X_FORWARDED_FOR%22&s...

I hope GitHub implement their own code search now

I was really happy to see an honest reaction from the team in a public way. I do think that in the long run Page's streamlining of Google's products is a good thing for the company, but I do hate to see something I used go away.

Likewise, I thought code-search was invaluable. I used it often while coding.

The plus side is that the team could reflect honestly (and in public). At some companies, commenting publicly would be a career limiting move.

And you really think it isn't here?

This really surprises me. Code Search is an engineering-centric tool. I'd think Google would want to keep it just for their own internal code base. What are the Chromium folks going to use now?

netcraft confirms it ...

I can't help but feel that this is part of a bigger reaction which itself will slowly kill the company as Google loses its way.

Was a public reason ever given besides "streamlining" ? If Google's business is getting eyeballs, you'd think an already built service would be a no-brainer to keep in maintenance mode. I can't imagine it used so many resources as to make it a net-negative, but perhaps I'm wrong.

I don't think streamlining was ever even public ally mentioned. It just became know that's Jobs said that to Page. More to te point, they weren't /getting/ enough eyeballs. Their revenue is more or less through ads, and since the main listed reason was financial...

Pathetic google.

"Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

My arse.

With source code becoming increasingly available and important, and already in a structured format, this goes completely against the above statement.

koders.com has most of the features of google code search, minus the regexp searching.

Yes, but with less relevant results.

Are these people being fired? Or reassigned into different roles? The email makes it seem like they're being let go...

Code search is going away.

My mistake - typo. Fixed the title.

That is the second big search task I switched to duckduckgo..

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