On a couple occasions, I've needed to be able to search for syntax without knowing what it's called. Also, sometimes I want to search for a code snippet and see how other people use some function or construct. I've found that google can often be lacking for code search purposes (not supporting special characters or regex), so I'd like to scratch my own itch and build a code search engine.
What I've done:
As of now, my search engine supports both exact and regex matching and I've indexed a portion of code snippets from StackOverflow. It works on special character queries that fail in other search engines like '>>=' or '.='. My concern is whether I have enough for an MVP (after I finish indexing SO and possibly GitHub). Since IH is mostly developers: I'd like to know what other features you would like and whether it sounds useful to you so far. Any thoughts on monetization would be great too.
Existing solutions:
There exist a couple code search engines online for example http://opensearch.krugle.org/ and https://searchcode.com/, however krugle seems to have a limited number of projects indexed while searchcode gives false positives for even simple queries like '>>='. I feel like there is room for me here.
hmm interesting idea - haven't heard of either code search engines before. I just tried out searchcode - their results page is pretty solid but it doesn't seem to have any pre-filtering mechanism - what I mean by that is that I'm not able to filter by language, source etc before executing the search. Also I'd want to ability to easily share a specific line of code (e.g. - I'm working with someone, they have a question and I'm able to find a solution using this tool - I want to be able to send them a link which points to a specific line not just the file).
Maybe some integrations with existing tools would be a cool feature (e.g. slack)