Awesome Code Search Engines for Programmers

There are numerous search engines that help you to find the  information you seek. But most times, when out looking for data related to a specific topic, you are forced to wade through pages and pages of search results before finding what you are looking for. For example, try searching for a chunk of code in Google or Yahoo search to know what I mean.

Realizing this drawback of general purpose search engines, a  number of websites have come up  which search for data related to one particular thing and they do it well.

The following are a collection of sites that allow you to search for chunks of code in any programming language thus making  your job as a programmer all the more easier.

• Koders.com is a free on-line search engine for open source software and other web-downloadable code. Each day, over 30,000 developers use Koders to search over 766 million lines of code written in over 30 languages and identified with 28 software licenses. Developers can use this free resource to quickly find the best reusable open source code, methods, examples, algorithms and more, enabling them to be more successful with open source and complete projects faster.
• Drupal Code Search specializes in searching for code specific to Drupal – a very popular content management system. It is powered by the Google code search API. From this site, you can search source code from thousands of Drupal modules and themes. You can use the power of regular expressions to find exactly what you need. And easily restrict results to specific Drupal versions and programming languages. You can also filter results by the version of Drupal and the kind of language you use such as PHP or Javascript.
• Google Code Search – This is a custom offering from Google themselves which you can use to search for public source code. Also take a look at Google advanced code search.
• Code Snipplr – Snipplr is a public source code repository that gives you a place to store and organize all the little pieces of code that you use each day. Best of all, it lets you share your code snippets with other coders and designers. Not exactly a search engine per say but you can search for code that others have saved on this site. It acts more like a search directory.
• QuickRef.org – Find programming documentation fast. Just start typing and this Ajax based site will search for and bring to your finger tips the code snippets and documentation you are searching for. What makes it a very good site is its simple non-cluttered interface.
• Codebase.com – This is a leading code search site. Rather than treating code as text, Codase understands programming languages, and treats code as code, the way it’s supposed to be. This unique and syntax-aware approach provides the most accurate and detailed search results with fine granularity levels of controls. With Codase, you can search functions, classes, strings, constants, macros, comments and other programming language constructs.
  Codase hosts huge amount of open source codes providing a much better coverage, as it covers codes usually hidden inside compressed files and source control repositories, where general search engines fail to find and index. In addition, Codase only indexes and searches high quality codes with every line of code literally validated and compiled by intelligent and powerful source code analysis engine.
• Coolcommands.com – This is a search site with a difference. It helps you search  for Unix and Linux scripts instead of chunks of code. It is maintained wholly through user contributions.
• CodeFetch.com – This is a wonderful search engine which allows you to search for code snippets from a large collection of programming languages. Its specialty is that it searches the code of programming books.
• GotAPI.org – This is a comprehensive site which contain upto date code syntax for HTML, JavaScript and CSS. A very good reference. What is more, each section opens in seperate tabs within the web page which makes browsing for the code all the more comfortable.
• RubyOnRails.org – This is a comprehensive resource for Ruby language API.
• DZone.com – This is not a code search engine per se but a site which provides links to numerous popular sites which contain interesting programming code and articles. Worth checking out.
• JQuery Docs – This is the official documentation for JQuery. It contains help, API and UI reference which is (I may add) searchable.

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