Dominate Google’s Universal Search: Google Code Search

Just like the previous post on Google Book Search and tomorrow’s post on Google Patent Search, Google Code Search only pertains to a small group of publishers and searchers. However, because Google Code Search results can be displayed within Google’s Universal Search, I am taking a brief moment to cover code submission and optimization tactics. A good example is a google search for “python”.

Clicking through on the “Code” link results in the Code Search results page:

Submitting your source code is easy. Head over to the submit page and let them know if your code is in an archive, CVS or Subversive directory. Once you provide the URL or file path, Google will download the code and determine whether or not to display it in the search results.

One of the most important things to include in your source code is the code or a separate license file. Google Code Search makes no claims about accurately guessing the type of license an author wants. In an effort to protect themselves, they have a fairly typical (for Google) removal request form. Again, it’s a “shoot first and ask questions later” approach as they can’t even guarantee speedy removal of contested code.

Perhaps the only optimization tactic would be including descriptive comments in your code. Of course, this is a matter of personal preference but human-readable comments make your code much easier to understand and search.

Other than the slim Help section, Google Code Search Google Group is sparsely populated and there are no active discussions taking place, just random feature requests. I doubt anybody’s listening.

You’re certainly not going to get famous by submitting your code to Code Search, but you just might help somebody (hacks like me) who uses the tool looking for help with implementing new projects.

Updated list of categories covered:

7/31 – Google Maps

8/1 – Google News

8/2 – Youtube Video

8/3 – Google Images

8/6 – Google Blog Search

8/8 – Google Base

8/9 – Google Books

8/10 – Google Groups

8/13 – Google Code Search

Any others I’m missing? Leave a comment. Thanks!

4 thoughts on “Dominate Google’s Universal Search: Google Code Search”

Andrew -

The folks I know who use Code Search use it mostly to dig for security issues – amazing what kinds of regular expressions will hit common code idioms that are bugs that can be exploited.

Code Search is one of the things you’d want to optimize if you were looking for a programming job – make sure that if you claim to have python experience that someone can check your contributions out to some open source project. This also works for non-code contributions to projects, since the docs for many projects have plenty of shout outs to people who contributed ideas, reviews, usability suggestions, documentation, beta testing, bug finding etc.

(page one for my last name shows contributions to BIND, emacs, pine)

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as to other things to add to this list, I’d be sure to write up Google Alerts + its integration with Google Groups for tracking searches to fast-moving topics over time.

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