Google has announced the launch of Code Search for its popular open source projects — Angular, Bazel, Dart, ExoPlayer, Firebase SDK, Flutter, Go, gVisor, Kythe, Nomulus, Outline, and Tensorflow.

As Kris Hildrum of Google’s Code Search Team puts it, “Code Search is one of Google’s most popular internal tools, and now we have a version (same binary, different flags) targeted to open source communities.”

• Googlers get a rich code browsing experience. For example, the blame button shows which user last changed each line and you can display history on the same page as the file contents. It supports a powerful search language and, for some repositories, cross-references.
• Users can now find what they want faster as suggest-as-you-type in any search box annotates suggestions with the type of code object, the repository, and the path.
• The search language supports regular expressions and a number of helpful search atoms.
• Suggest-as-you-type in any search box annotates suggestions with the type of code object, the repository and the path, helping users find what they want faster.
• In addition to text search, users will find some of the open source repositories with cross-references powered by Kythe. Kythe is a Google open source project that includes tools to help understand code.

“Open-source communities use a broader set of build systems than Google. To support cross-references, Kythe added drop-in support for Bazel, CMake, Maven, and Go,” added Hildrum. Besides planning to offer Code Search for more repositories in future, Google is currently making investment in making the application keyboard-navigable and usable with a screen reader.