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Comment by xroche | Hacker News Reader

RIP Google Code Search, aka the best code search ever. No credible competitor has yet emerged, and this is a real loss for all programmers: no more easy searching for sample code in obscure WIN32 Api, easy searching for arch-specific POSIX implementation details used by various open source projects, global error message grepping, and countless other little things which are not incredibly painful and difficult. I am still puzzled that we suffered such a tremendous regression.

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Debian code search is the closest replacement I've found, though it doesn't really compare:

https://codesearch.debian.net/

SourceGraph might be interesting to look at. https://sourcegraph.com/

I heard rumours that it was shut down because of license reasons. i.e. displaying the code to a user was making a copy in a legal sense, this has differing implications depending on the original software license.

You don't think github is all that and more?

Github search is fine, do not get me wrong. But this is like telling someone lamenting on the hypothetical end of Google search: "Just use the search function in Facebook, you don't need more"

GitHub's search doesn't support regular expressions.

(I'm aware you can clone the repo and search it locally, but that somewhat defeats the point - especially for large projects.)

I'm pretty sure Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, and probably a lot of other github employees, lurk around here... if you harp on it enough they'll probably make it happen.

What do Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have to do with Github?

My primary use of Google Code search was, searching for this rare function (like a POSIX one) whose man page I can't understand and is largely undocumented elsewhere. I would often try to understand how other projects are using this function via internet-wide code search. :D

While Github is great, I think it still hosts only a small fraction of all the code that is public.

Github is a great alternative for Google Code.

Nothing currently out there is as good as Google Code Search was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code_Search

Can you search github with a regex?

We use github enterprise and I've only heard complaints about its search capabilities.

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