Google has just pubblished its Google Code Search which may have a difficult start because there already are some really good products on the Web, best known of course the Web 2.0 Search Engine Koders.com.

Google Code Search is now live — it gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code. It includes:

• Support for precise searches using regular expressions
• Restricts by language, license, or filename with advanced operators
• A search index that includes billions of lines of code

Code Search crawls and indexes publicly hosted archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip) and CVS and Subversion repositories, making them searchable in one place. Results are also accessible via a GData feed, which we hope people will use to create plugins for their favorite editors and IDEs.

From what I’ve seen so far, it is merely a half hearted attack at Koders, lacking many usefull and nice-to-have features, such as Code-Linking (links between sourcefiles) and code highlighting (which is an absolute must). Hopefully they’re going to improve things further, as a good Source Search tool can be really helpfull.