by brad
Favorite Code Search Engines
8:52 pm in PPC Marketing Blog, Search Engines by brad
Being only slightly technical, I like to use code search engines to find examples that are being implemented or help files without the clutter of non-relevant sites.
Here are my favorite code search engines:
http://www.allthecode.com – This one is good for java and some more technical code. It’s not great for finding example code on webpages.
http://www.google.com/codesearch – This is one of my favorites for finding onpage code.
http://www.krugle.com – Allows you to search for code by specific language. Sometimes I don’t find what I’m looking for, especially when it’s onpage.
http://www.koders.com – This one seems to be the most complete as far as finding information. However, sometimes it can be clunky to use as the UI isn’t always intuitive.
Hi Brad,
Thanks for taking the time to do a comparison. I’m curious about two things you mention above…
1. What does “onpage code” mean? I thought you were talking about code on a web page, but in that case Google code search won’t find it, or so I thought.
2. Any specific examples of searches that you mention where you felt that Koders provided the most complete results?
Thanks for any follow-up…we’re always interested in improving our search results.
– Ken
Ken,
I probably didn’t go a good job of explaining ‘on page’. What I mean is the code being rendered to create a page (i.e. if I wanted to find examples of a wordpress plugin bSuite being used, I could search for ‘bSuite’ in Google and find the code. So, I suppose searching the ‘html’ of the page (although it could be php, java, etc) is where I find Google excels.
Where I don’t think it excels, and i like Krugle.com better is when searching for actual code examples; such as http://krugle.com/kse/codespaces/DyhHpq (the query was ‘mysql create tables with null values). Google’s snippets are all identical so it’s difficult to even see where first to click to find more info, and I don’t think it’s as relevant.
My thought is that Google has many more pages indexed, so if one is looking for examples of more basic java/html/php code that renders a page, Google is better. If one is looking for more advanced info (especially by language) than Krugle is better.