Wanted: A Javascript Source Code Search Engine

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, June 23, 2006 @ 1:02 pm

I use quite a few search engines in my day-to-day work. I expect you do too. There's one that I use quite a bit to see what's happening in the Open Source world. No, it's not Freshmeat. It's Koders.

Koders.com allows you to search the source code of thousands of Open Source projects. It allows you to filter by language (and license). That's really very handy when your looking for coding examples. It also let's you see when and where someone is using a particular Javascript library in their project. Looking for Dojo and Scriptaculous, it is no surprise that Webwork and Rails show up.

Now endless hours of fun can be had with the Koders search engine, but what I'd really like is a search engine that allows me to search all of the Javascript on the web. It's out there, it's readable, it's searchable. Surely google or Yahoo or whoever already slurps in the Javascript in their crawls. Why not add a new google engine for searching Javascript?

To anyone looking for examples of Javascript or AJAX, the utility of such a search engine is self evident. It might make corporate IT managers a little nervous to have all of their logic flapping in the breeze. Let that be a lesson to not put your business logic in the UI.

If anyone know of such a search engine or of any hacks or tricks to make existing search engines give up their secrets, please let me know. Passing xmlhttprequest filetype:js into google gives a less than satisfying result.

Update 1: Building such a search engine shouldn't be all that hard. The pieces are already out there. See the Heritrix web crawler that the Internet Archive uses for it's work.

agile ajax

Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   It’s all I wanted too. some of my sites are being ripped off and I could recognize them by some programming strings. If you find some way to search inside JS code please let me know
   cheers

   Comment by Ezequiel Gomes, Friday, June 8, 2007 @ 11:19 am

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