By: Nik Cubrilovic | Source: techcrunch.com

AllTheCode have today launched a new code search engine which has joined a group of existing solutions including site such as Krugle, Koders and Google Code Search, no less.

All The Code at this time is a source code search engine for the Java language only. Plans are in the works to add more languages later. All The Code has no mechanism for submission of code. This too is promised for the future. It looks like there is a lot of development still to do. According to the engine’s FAQ a relevancy algorithm that takes into consideration the code and its frequency of use differentiates All The Code from the other code source engines.

We previously told about the state of code search, about the then new Google Code Search, an we pointed out that in our own tests that none of the sites seemed to return adequate results.

Today we put AllTheCode to the same tests, and the results were varied. While AllTheCode does return very relevant results, it doesn’t allow the user to filter the results based on the programming language or any other variables. The press release for the launch of AllTheCode mentioned that the ranking is based on how frequently the code snipet has been implemented, which seems like common sense for a code search engine but it seemed to be lacking in the other code search engines the last time we ran them.

one test was to search for an implementation of the MD5 algorithm, with AllTheCode the first page of results are mostly Java implementations - we couldn’t find a way to filter the results (the site says they are returning Java results only for now). If you are a programmer, your best results might be to use a mix of the various code search engines, at the moment there is no clear leader which means that there is a clear opportunity for one of these apps to take the lead.

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