Replacement for Google Code Search?
Google Code Search has been incredibly valuable to me as a developer - I use it a couple times a week to see how other developers have used (usually poorly documented) APIs. It's also convenient to see the internals of some of those APIs, or to find which API corresponds to the functionality you want (it's a great resource for Android in particular -- give it some of the text you see on screen, and it'll usually find the implementing class).
Now that Google shutting down code search as of January 15, 2012, are there any good replacements?
Answer
I have reviewed the following sites
The good
- Krugle
- search[code]
- GrepCode (only Java)
The broken or unsuitable
(I'll have to try these again later)
- Antepedia (GitHub login broken as of 2016-08-23; no code search?)
- SymbolHound (generic search engine, not just code)
- Codase (only C, C++, Java; service unavailable as of 2016-08-23)
- Codefetch (unreachable as of 2016-08-23)
The dead
Koders(discontinued)SymbolHound Code Search(discontinued)
When I originally did the review, Koders turned out to be the winner for my purposes, but I really liked the user interface and features of SymbolHound Code Search better. The only problem with SymbolHound was the small number of sites it has indexed. The search[code] engine was also promising at that time.
Many of the sites I've reviewed have since been discontinued completely or have disabled their code search functionality. Krugle and search[code] seem to be chugging along, and GrepCode is good if you live in the Java world.