Google adds improvements to Code Search

Google has expanded the capabilities of its Code Search feature, including introducing better indexing, the company claims.

On Friday the search specialist introduced additions to Code Search including better ranking, results and the addition of new countries to the code database.

The service, conceived by the Google Labs early technology group and launched in October, can crawl publicly available code, most of which is made available through open-source projects. The search and indexing can cover code on web pages as well as code that resides in compressed files.

The improvements to the ranking system include additions to class and method and ranking, so class and function definitions are closer to the top for a lot of searches.

Additions include sample code snippets from web pages. According to Google: "Now when you search for things like [LFractalCanvas] or [nph-refresh], you'll have a better chance of finding what you want."

The additional countries include European states such as France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, as well as Japan, Russia, China and Brazil.