Bing Now Provides Exact Snippets of Code for Developers' Queries (searchenginejournal.com)

"Bing has launched a new intelligent search feature which provides the exact piece of code a developer is looking for," writes Search Engine Journal. An anonymous reader quotes their report: The code snippet will appear right on the search results page itself, which means users will not have to skim through long threads and articles to find the one thing they're looking for. Bing calls this new feature a "Code Sample Answer" and says it's designed to help save developers' time. "Many of us are developers too, and we thought: what if Bing were intelligent enough to do this for us? What if it could save users' time by automatically finding the exact piece of code containing the answer to the question? That is how Code Sample Answer was born..."

A Code Sample Answer will trigger only when Bing intelligently detects the coding intent with high confidence. "To achieve this level of precision for query intent detection, Bing's natural language processing pipelines for developers leverages patterns found in training data from developer queries collected over the years containing commonly used terms and text structure typical for coding queries. The system also leverages a multitude of click signals to improve the precision even further"... [I]t also covers other tools used by developers. For example, a Code Sample Answer can be triggered when searching for git commands and their syntax.
Bing extracts "the best matched code samples from popular, authoritative and well moderated sites like Stackoverflow, Github, W3Schools, MSDN, Tutorialpoints, etc. taking into account such aspects as fidelity of API and programming language match, counts of up/down-votes, completeness of the solution and more."

JAXenter.com notes they obtained similar results using the privacy-friendly search engine DuckDuckGo, and ultimately asks whether this functionality could affect the search habits of developers. "Is this new feature enough to make Bing a viable search engine tool for programmers or will Google be the go-to for hunting down source code?"

Comments

Trump is a traitor - snip his tiny balls off

[Anonymous Coward]

Mueller's search is the best search engine in America. #Traitorfinder

I am a clueless manager...

[richrz]

Now I can forward more stuff to look smart!

Re:Let me bing up a vrius

[KiloByte]

It won't be long before stuff like fork bombs and data deleters get "suggested" for common programming queries.

I don't see a downside. Someone bad enough to code via cargo culting snippets shouldn't be allowed anywhere near actual data. Sure, it'd decimate Javascript and PHP coder base, but that's not a downside either.

Not a good thing

[gweihir]

It will allow some "developers" that have no clue what they are doing to fly under the radar for some more time and do more damage. And that is basically the only thing this will do.

Re:Not a good thing

[datavirtue]

These people have taken over. They are now development managers, senior developers, and architects.

You know how you learn not deploy shit code to production? When you have to support it. Most of the people in the above mentioned roles have never had to support software in production, much less troubleshoot the root cause. I have, and the most common issue has been copy-pasta code and snippets from popular websites and blogs (sprinkle in the failure to read the documentation).

All corporations remove support far away from developers. All corporations have absolute shit software despite the army of professionals working for them. They throw it over the wall and call it a day. The managers insulate the team from issues by lying to management or not telling them at all.