How Google Code Search Worked: Regex Matching with a Trigram Index (2012)

This reminds me of a browser-side search I once wrote using a combination of regex, Soundex, and Damerau-Levenshtein. The reason I made this browser-side is because the app doesn't have that many records that it needed to be on the server; the records were in the hundreds to thousands, not millions. https://github.com/SCPR/fire-tracker/blob/master/app/lib/sea... Not the best code I've ever written by far, but it was a neat little experiment. Basically, indexing each record with Soundex(phonetics) makes the search…

Google made a mistake in killing code search. Indexing the world's source code and making it searchable is so obviously part of their core mission that I wonder how this decision even got made. Yeah, code search is a niche market numerically speaking, but intellectually and economically (considering the economic impact of software) it is vital. Google was doing so much better a job of it than anybody else that they completely owned the space. How could that not be…

I am planning on adding functionality like this to ripgrep. If folks have opinions on how it should work, I'd love to hear from you! https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/issues/1497

Debian Code Search is based on this work! :) https://codesearch.debian.net/ (If you want a lot more details, check out my thesis on it: https://codesearch.debian.net/research/bsc-thesis.pdf)