An Enhanced Graph-Based Infrastructure for Software Search Engines

The first generation of software search engines such as Merobase, Sourcerer etc. Showed that it is possible to support reasonably sophisticated searches over large bodies of software components using indices based on full-text search engines (most commonly Lucene). However, the "tricks" these engines use to map code structure to flat text are not only inflexible, they do not scale well to components composed of multiple program modules (e.g. Interfaces, classes etc.) As a result, beyond plain string matching, they are only able to support a limited and a priori fixed set of query types, and are rarely, if ever able, to find components composed of more than one code module. In this paper we present an index representation approach which is able to support the key information bound up in source code in a more accurate, flexible way, and thus efficiently support a much wider range of searches on components composed of multiple program modules.