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GitHub code search is generally available. I’ve been a beta user of GitHub’s new code search for a year and a half now and I wouldn’t want to be without it. It’s spectacularly useful: it provides fast, regular-expression-capable search across every public line of code hosted by GitHub—plus code in private repos you have access to.

I mainly use it to compensate for libraries with poor documentation—I can usually find an example of exactly what I want to do somewhere on GitHub.

It’s also great for researching how people are using libraries that I’ve released myself—to figure out how much pain deprecating a method would cause, for example. # 8th May 2023, 6:52 pm

Typesense (via) A new (to me) open source search engine, with a focus on being “typo-tolerant” and offering great, fast autocomplete—incredibly important now that most searches take place using a mobile phone keyboard. Similar to Elasticsearch or Solr in that it runs as an HTTP server that you serve JSON via POST and GET—and it offers read-only replicas for scaling and high availability. And since it’s 2018, if you have Docker running (I use Docker for Mac) you can start up a test instance with a one-line shell command. # 6th April 2018, 5:07 pm

Whoosh. A brand new, pure-python full text indexing engine (think Lucene). Claims to offer performance in the same league as wrappers to C or Java libraries. If this works as well as it claims it will be an excellent tool for adding search to projects that wish to avoid a dependency on an external engine. # 12th February 2009, 12:49 pm

Grub. Jimmy Wales just announced at OSCON that Wikia have acquired Grub from LookSmart, and will be releasing it as open source. # 27th July 2007, 5:24 pm