October 6, 2006
Google's OSS search service

I'm sure by now everyone has seen Google's announcement. This is just one of the many articles written about it. I don't want to be too dramatic, but this may be the biggest catalyst for open source in a long time. I was discussing this with our CTO, Ray Waldin, who made this observation...

What sets them apart is that they have created a full- text index, whereas others only do inverted word indexes. What that means is that on Google Code Search, searching for "putStream" finds all occurrences of putStream (), InputStream, OutputStream, etc., whereas on Koders you'll only find files which actually contain the word "putStream".

Google is already one of the primary tools for the open source community - and this will only make search easier.