Google Dumps Code Search – Should We Be Worried?

From the ‘Is Killing a Free Service Evil?’ files:

Google does a lot of good for developers. At one time or another, I’d bet that many developers have played with a Google API at some point.

Developers have also come to rely on Google’s Code Search over the years. It’s a service that I first wrote about when it launched five years ago. At the time, then Google product manager Tom Stocky was enthusiastic about the effort as a way to easily search for publicly accessible source code.

Now, after five years of great service and millions of queries, Google is set to shutter the service and kill it off.

I think that’s evil.

“Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012,” is all that Google’s blog post on the closure of Code Search had to say.

All part of a fall sweep, which includes the closing of Buzz. While Buzz was always kind of a joke and never really worked the way it should have, Code Search has been a useful tool.

So why is Google shutting it down?

Google want to focus on Google+ and its other services – i.e. the services it hopes to make money from. I guess (and if you work for Google pls let me know..) is that Code Search was never a money maker for Google and so it fell under the axe.

It’s a real shame and I know there are other services out there, but I won’t mention any of them in this post, because none of them have ever really worked for me when I was looking for code snippets and such. I really feel for the hundreds (or is it thousands?) of sites and devs that have relied on the associated Code Search API that now have only a couple months to find a replacement.

Ah well, I guess we can’t complain much, considering it was free and Google never said it would be supported forward. I personally just wish it wasn’t going away, it won’t be easy finding a replacement.