Ask HN: Good source code search engines?

20 points

10 years ago

I recently saw an article on HN about how to use GitHub's search as a starting point when writing code. That indeed is a great trick and it has already helped me save a lot of time.

Unfortunately, GitHub's search is very lacking and most of the time instead of showing relevant search results it just shows lots and lots of duplicates for the main library.

For example, I was searching for this[1], but the search results show the Main SDK files and not the files created with the SDK (which is what would've helped me). I couldn't find a way to suppress the files or duplicate searches.

So I tried looking for a good source code search engine and I've find none so far. I've tried almost everything I could find on Google and Quora but most of these services are either discontinued (Google code, etc) or very bad.

So, I was wondering what you guys use to search source code? And are there any other tricks like GitHub's search that can increase coding productivity (I think searching SO is also very useful).

[1] https://github.com/search?l=php&q=createEnvironment+ElasticBeanstalkClient&ref=searchresults&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93

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