Google have released Code Search, a search service specifically targeted at developers searching for source code.

The reason this has come about is that standard Google Search won’t search for the special characters used in a lot of programming languages (for example, curly brackets { and } which are heavily used in C, C++, C#, PHP, Java etc.). This means that a search query for something within programming will be searched for with the special symbols stripped out, and the programmer ends up with completely irrelavant content.

Code Search attemps to alleviate this problem by not only allowing support for these characters, but also offering regular expression support (a kind of geeky advanced search thing), sorting and filtering by licence and the software the code is for.

Google are putting an emphasis on using this for finding open source code, but there is certainly a potential for accidentally (or otherwise) leaked proprietary code and Google may well find itself in hot water if this does happen. The potential issue is that once some code that shouldn’t be there enters Google’s index, it is very difficult to get it out again.

While this doesn’t have much use for people that aren’t into coding, it certainly has a value for finding that code snippet you need or if like me, you constantly forget how to do something in a particular language and need to search to remind yourself. Programmers, enjoy.