The paper presents a new approach to source code exploration, which is the result of integrating the Google Desktop Search (GDS) engine into the Eclipse development environment. The resulting search engine, named Google Eclipse Search (GES), provides improved searching in Eclipse software projects.

The paper advocates for a component-based approach that allows us to develop strong tools, which support various maintenance tasks, by leveraging the strengths of existing frameworks and components. The development effort for such tools is reduced, while customization and flexibility, to fully support user needs, is maintained. GES allows developers to search software projects in a manner similar to searching the internet or their own desktops. The proposed approach takes advantages of the power of GDS for quick and accurate searching and of Eclipse’s extensibility. The paper discusses usage scenarios, advantages, limitations, and possible extensions of the proposed tandem.

During software evolution most activities require the users to understand large and often new parts of a software system. Most of the time, the developers rely on the source code and the available documentation alone to achieve this understanding. In this context, source code searching and browsing are two of the most common activities undertaken by developers [4]. These activities directly support such tasks as concept location in source code, impact analysis, change propagation, debugging, and comprehension of software in general. Given their widespread use, we need to support them with fast and accurate tools and techniques.

Traditionally, most developers were (and still are) using grep (global regular expression print) for regular expression search, or variants of it, to help them locate items of interest in the source code and documentation. Existing integrated development environments (IDE) feature powerful searching tools also based on regular expression matching and on other mechanisms.

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