Today, Google Labs released a beta for a new search service targeted at computer programmers; Google Code Search.  This new service will crawl the vast stores of publicly available code (mostly open source) to provide programmers with an easily searchable index of code to help find solutions to various programming tasks.

Google expects this new search tool to be mostly used by students trying to learn complex programming languages, while being an occasional resource to more season and serious coders.

While the code being indexed is open source, and reuse is technically allowed, GNU Public License issues could arise, discouraging professional use within non-open source projects.