Novel and Applied Algorithms in a Search Engine for Java Code Snippets - Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse - page 282

Fig. 14.6 Comparison of Page Title + Text Segment, Text Segment, Most Matched Paragraph, and
Last Paragraph
14.6 Conclusion
In this chapter, we describe some design issues for the algorithms used in “Juicy”,
a search engine that capable of search for Java code snippets. This search engine is
designed to help developers who are looking for a small chunk of source code to
use as a reminder or to learn unfamiliar syntax. Juicy has been populated with over
34,000 Java tutorial pages that have been crawled from the web. In the repository,
the code snippets are treated as primary documents and the surrounding text treated
as metadata. Users can search the repository using a basic or advanced interface, us-
ing both terms from the source code and the metadata. When presenting the results
of a search, Juicy provides a brief description for each code snippet in order to give
its users more clues on what the code snippet could mean. By providing this infor-
mation for each code snippet in search result, users could form better understanding
of each code snippet and make better decision when picking them to incorporate
with their project.
Our research is a starting point for the work necessary to build a robust snippet
search engine. Additional work is needed to improve the usability of the search
engine, to enable the back end to work with other programming languages, and to
incorporate other kinds of resources (such as emails and forums) in the repository.
Finally, the effectiveness and helpfulness of a snippet search engine needs to be
evaluated. Nevertheless, Juicy is a proof of concept tool that sheds light on issues in
the design and construction of a snippet search engine.
Acknowledgements This material is based upon work supported by the NSF under Grant No.
IIS-0846034 and by the UCI Summer Undergraduate Research Program. Any opinions, findings,
and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not
necessary reflect the views of the NSF.