Juicy - Java Code Snippet Search Engine

Created by Pete Tantikul (ptantiku@gmail.com) as part of his MSc thesis 
in the Dept. of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. 

Abstract

Programmers often look for a ``snippet,'' that is, a small piece of 
example code, to remind themselves of how to solve a problem or to 
quickly learn about a new resource. However, existing tools such as 
general-purpose search engines and code-specific search engines do
not deal well with searches for snippets. In this chapter, we present 
a prototype search engine designed to work with code snippets. Our 
approach is based on using the non-code text on a web page as metadata 
for the snippet to improve indexing and retrieval. We discuss some 
implementation issues that we encountered, which lead to lessons learned 
for others who follow. These issues include: extracting snippets from 
web pages, selecting and indexing metadata, matching query terms with 
multiple metadata indexes, and identifying a text summary to be used in 
the presentations of results. 

See thesis\thesis.pdf for details.