You have probably heard by now that Google is shuttering its developers-only search service, Google Code Search. According to a blog post by products VP Bradley Horowitz, the service will shut down on January 15, 2012.

Judging from traffic on the service's user forum, Code Search didn't see a lot of use. And that's too bad – I think I would have used the service constantly, during my coding days, to find documentation and code snippets that would help me solve programming problems.

The end of Google Code Search is an opportunity for other sites dedicated to helping developers avoid reinventing the wheel. I've visited a bunch of them lately.

• Black Duck Software's koders.com is a full-blown alternative to Google Code Search. It indexes just code – no doc files. Where GCS employs – employed, I suppose I should say – regular-expression syntax to let developers fine-tune their searches, koders.com relies upon a spare set of include and exclude operators.

• Aragon Consulting Group's Krugle looks like a general-access code-search tool, but I haven't found a way to make it deliver many hits. It seems primarily intended to persuade you to install the Krugle Enterprise Edition as a sort of searchable repository for your corporate code, test plans, and configuration files. Still, Krugle gets a lot of mentions in developer forums as a viable successor to GCS.

• SourceForge is a tremendous resource – a huge library of open-source projects, each with complete source code. But it isn't searchable on a keyword-by-keyword basis, and it really isn't intended to augment your docs with sample code.

• Like SourceForge, github is a large collection of project files for working projects. You can find a lot of vendor sample code there too. But ultimately, this isn't the kind of searchable library that developers need when they're searching for line-by-line solutions to coding problems.

• I like the Merobase Software Component Finder. If you're looking for Java or C++ code, it's a pretty good source. Of course, one of the strengths of GCS was that it searched so many languages at once. Merobase simply doesn't have the same breadth of coverage.

• DZone Snippets is run by the good people at DZone. I love the idea of Snippets but the service is unfortunately undermoderated. And it's more of a public-access repository than a comprehensive search engine.

• Codase is promising but apparently the project was abandoned years ago. Maybe the shutdown of GCS will motivate the folks behind Codase to put the project back on the front burner.

• I like Snipplr too – it's a good source of code snippets. But it searches only code that has been stored at the site. Oh well.

• Search[code] is a terrific site but it has a misleading name. It doesn't really search for code, but for documentation. Of course, the docs often include example code, so the site is plenty useful. It's fast, too. I really like this one.

That's it for me. If you've found a worthy successor to GCS, drop a note in the Comments section.

Web recommendation: Rumor has it that the link I appended to my last post is no longer active. (Don't you wish the Web had technology that would inform bloggers of such events before readers notice?) Anyway, here's a link that may still be active by the time you get to it: Disturbing Article. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.