October 6, 2006

Now Google wants to use its search expertise and bring it to the next level with one of its most captive audiences: open-source and commercial software developers and programmers.

Yesterday, Google launched a new website, Google Code Search (http://www.google.com/codesearch), which it says will allow software developers to search billions of lines of code that will help them write their own software applications.

Tom Stocky, a product manager at Google says this new project will crawl publicly available code, most of which is made available through open-source developments. Google's search and indexing will cover code on Web pages and code that resides in certain compressed files.

Google expects that its new software search engine will be used mostly as a learning tool to help students and serious programmers, rather than a way to find and copy other people's code.

"Most of the code is open source so you can reuse it as much as you wish. But I don't think that's the primary use. It's more about how to learn about things and, when you're building open-source packages, to make sure you're doing it the right way," Stocky said.

As an example, a software developer may need to write a specific function as part of an application and search the Internet to see other examples that were done in the past.

For the most part, there are many Google software developers and engineers that participate in open-source projects. Most of them already use these code-searching capabilities internally. Since this project is a Google Labs project, the company however is not yet seeking to make money through ads linked to searches, Stocky said.

Google's new software search engine will allow programmers to do both keyword search and "regular expressions," which allow people to search a specified pattern, he said. For example, a person could narrow a search to JavaScript functions, which will help find more examples, Stocky said.

As it already does with many of its other services, Google will soon release an API (application programming interface) that will create an XML feed based on a specific query. Although it doesn't sell programming tools, Google does have an active developer-outreach program and relies a lot on third-party programmers to further expand its many services.

Case in point: developers have created popular applications that display information from a Web site, such as real-estate listings, using the Google Maps Project.

"Increasingly today, the developer community is the way Google products and services are getting to scale," Stocky said. "We think software developers and systems integrators can really enhance Google's offerings and use its search technology to improve their own software and related applications."

Source: C-Net News