Google and Open Source: New Move

October 24, 2011

In Google’s current scheme to become fully integrated into every aspect of users’ lives, Google is oddly cutting out one very important and useful tool.

Google announced that it is closing Google Code Search in January 2012. This search engine specifically crawls open source software; Google says the closure is part of their plan to focus on products that people use multiple times a day. We learn more about the closure in the article, “Google’s Open Source Search to End” on The H Open Source:

When the service shuts down, the third party open source plug-ins that use the API, such as those for Eclipse and IntelliJ, will also cease to function. On Twitter, Miguel De Icaza called the service ‘The one tool I use every day.’ One of the few cross-language alternatives to Google Code Search is Black Duck’s Koders.com.

The closure of Code Search is part of a “fall sweep”, which also sees the final closure of the Jaiku service… and the University Research Program for Google Search…”
The tool was created in 2006 to help open source developers looking for snippets of code, but so much for openness. Google is becoming less and less friendly toward open source and I find this very disappointing. The company may lose many faithful users who use the tool for programming just in the name of more “efficient” operation.

We are learning about Android’s open source angle. Google seems to be becoming more like IBM in some aspects of its approach to open source. Does Google want open source on Googley terms?

Andrea Hayden, October 24, 2011

Comments

3 Responses to “Google and Open Source: New Move”

Google and Open Source: New Move : Beyond Search | Linux Supersaniya on October 24th, 2011 1:33 am

[…] When the service shuts down, the third party open source plug-ins that use the API, such as those for Eclipse and IntelliJ, will also cease to function. On Twitter, Miguel De Icaza called the service 'The one tool I use every day. [Read More] […]
Ben Boyter on December 19th, 2011 5:33 pm

An alternative to look at is http://searchco.de/ which also offers regex code search over repositories of free code. For example,

http://searchco.de/?q=/IsNullOrEmpty/

Full disclosure I am the creator of searchco.de
Tom Feldtmose on January 19th, 2012 12:20 am

SymbolHound has also released a Beta version of a new source code repository search feature. You can try it here: http://www.symbolhound.com/codesearch
-Tom (co-founder of SymbolHound)

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.