Toward social-technical code search

Abstract

With the vast amount of source code that is publicly available today, searching for code has become an integral part of the programming experience. While a few dedicated code search engines are available, we contend in this paper that they have not nearly reached their full potential. Particularly, we believe that it is necessary for code search engines to not merely index code, but also construct a rich network of social-technical information that surrounds that code. With such information, much richer queries can be issued and novel interfaces can be built through which the results of such queries can be explored more intuitively. We make the case for social-technical code search, introduce six categories of social-technical information and how it would enhance search, and briefly introduce CodeExchange, our prototype platform we are developing to explore social-technical code search.