How were developers solving this before Sourcegraph?
With a lot of duct tape or using a lot of command line tools like
Grep and modern variants like
ripgrep. Maybe the search in your
editor. The issue with those is that it's searching all over your local machine.
You have to clone the code, and that's enough friction that most people don't
want to do that. Even after you've cloned it, in order to get the navigational
primitives you have to set up code intelligence and the development environment.
It's got a little bit easier with cloud IDEs now, but oftentimes you still don't
have code intelligence. If you want to cross a dependency boundary or search
over a larger set of code, those don't really help with that.
Some people use GitHub but I don't think they've really prioritized search, at
least in the sort of depth that I think it deserves. There's some organizations
that have built internal code search engines and there’s some open source
projects too.
Facebook has an internal code search engine. Mozilla has one for all the Firefox
and related code bases. There's one for the Debian and Linux community that a
friend of mine, Michael Stapelberg built.
These are all precursors that demonstrate the need, especially as organizations
and projects expand in scale, both in terms of human head count and the amount
of code that they deal with. Google has one that people swear by. In fact, one
of our biggest sources of new users and customers is people leaving Google.
We think it's time to take all the lessons learned from those, roll it into
something that just works well universally for every language, for every code
host, for every sort of development org. We’re building it into this
comprehensive, Google-like search engine, not just a search engine that's
targeted at one particular corpus of code, but the worldwide, global human
knowledge graph that is built into code.
We want to make it so that you have a single search box that lets you jump
anywhere in the world of code, that understands what code is relevant to you and
allows you just to walk that knowledge web the same way you do using the
combination of Google and hyperlinks on the internet.
I think that is the next stage. The next big thing in software development is
getting it to the point where search is kind of a basic starting point for a lot
of developers when they go and understand code. Right now, I think we're still
in the Yahoo era of code, where a lot spreads through word of mouth or, maybe
there's blogs you follow, or you're searching for stuff using Google search, or
just finding it on GitHub. There's not really a direct discovery mechanism that
shows you relevant matches for a specific thing that you want to take a look at
in the moment.
