Google has announced some improvements to Google Code Search, Google’s search engine for finding code snippets and other geeky programming stuff.

The content of the search has been expanded to include individual code files and snippets from Web pages. Of course when I heard that I wanted to make sure that the Code Search still passed the Strawberry Shortcake Test. It does, but you get extremely weird results. They’re code all right — but the contents of databases, what looks like shopping carts, recipes (??). Anyway it passes.

Be sure to use the advanced search when working with Google Code. You’ll have the option to limit your search by language (from Ada to Yacc), by license type, package and file name, etc. You’ll also have the option of making your search case-sensitive. (Unfortunately the &as_case=y switch doesn’t work on the Web search results page, dammit.) Note that the query itself can be written as a regular expression. In fact there’s a lot of cool ways to search this database that you can’t search the Web database.

Google Code search is also inviting users to submit their own code, though the page warns that not all submitted code is included and that there’s no telling when it’ll actually turn up in the index.