Users will be able to search billions of lines of publicly available code using Google 's new code-search Web site

Google is taking its search expertise to one of its favourite audiences: software developers.

On Thursday the company is expected to launch a Web site, Google Code Search, which the company says will let programmers search billions of lines of code.

The service, conceived by the Google Labs early technology group, will crawl publicly available code, most of which is made available through open source projects. The search and indexing can cover code on Web pages as well as code that resides in compressed files, said Tom Stocky, a product manager at Google.

Google expects that the search engine will be used primarily as a learning tool to help students and serious programmers, rather than a way to find and copy another person's code.

Read more: ZDNet UK