Google has always been in the habit of lending a helping hand to programmers in distress. This time around, the Code Search Team has introduced six new features to come in handy to the developers who work with such large bases of code that searching through them becomes an ordeal.

The first feature that Dmitry Barashev from the Google Code Search Team describes on the official blog is Code Outline, which displays, when hit, the structure of code written Java, C, C++, C#, Python, JavaScript and Pascal. When selecting a program, the application offers a further look into all its lines, in a partitioned window.

A second feature allows users to be directed to the files included in the same package in Java, C, C++ and Python code. When programmers click on the Include and Import statements, they are directly sent to the included file. "In the case where the included file comes from a third-party library or, say, from Linux headers, a search is performed for the included file in the indexed code base," explains Barashev.

Of course, there is the possibility that the include list is too widespread, and finding out where a class or method is defined is quite difficult, if not altogether impossible. The two new features, "class" and "function", offer the opportunity of limiting the expression to these two specifications only. If the restriction still doesn't prove to be helpful and developers have to rely on a manual search at random, the new radio button "Search in" comes in handy. Together with the "package" operator, the "Search in" enables the search to be restricted to the explicitly stated package.

With these new tools, being a coder never seemed easier. To clarify the benefits of the new tools, the author of the post invites programmers to conduct a search with the old methods and then one more, with the new ones, to sense the difference.