Evaluating how developers use general-purpose web-search for code retrieval
Masudur Rahman, Jed Barson, Sydney Paul, Joshua Kayan, Federico Andrés Lois, Sebastián Quezada, Christopher Parnin, Kathryn Thomasset Stolee, Baishakhi Ray · 2018
Search is an integral part of a software development process. Developers often use search engines to look for information during development, including reusable code snippets, API understanding, and reference examples. Developers tend to prefer general-purpose search engines like Google, which are often not optimized for code related documents and use search strategies and ranking techniques that are more optimized for generic, non-code related information.