AllTheCode Launches New Code Search

AllTheCode have today launched a new code search engine which has joined a group of existing solutions including site such as Krugle, Koders and Google Code Search, no less. We previously wrote about the state of code search in a post about the then new Google Code Search, and we pointed out that in our own tests that none of the sites seemed to return adequate results.

Today we put AllTheCode to the same tests, and the results were varied. While AllTheCode does return very relevant results, it doesn’t allow the user to filter the results based on the programming language or any other variables. The press release for the launch of AllTheCode mentioned that the ranking is based on how frequently the code snipet has been implemented, which seems like common sense for a code search engine but it seemed to be lacking in the other code search engines the last time we ran them.

In the last post, one test was to search for an implementation of the MD5 algorithm, with AllTheCode the first page of results are mostly Java implementations – we couldn’t find a way to filter the results (the site says they are returning Java results only for now). If you are a programmer, your best results might be to use a mix of the various code search engines, at the moment there is no clear leader which means that there is a clear opportunity for one of these apps to take the lead.