sourcegraph

zoekt

Go2023–2026

sourcegraph / zoekt

zoekt

Fast trigram based code search

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15Distinct people

15Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

2.1KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Fast trigram based code search

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year15 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2023-07-04 14:32:57 UTC to 2026-04-29 13:56:19 UTC.

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	0	5
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	1	4
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	1	1
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3

What Hacker News says

15 sources

StepBroBD·Apr 29, 2026

I've seen a few post on moving off of gh and now is probably a pretty good time (?) to show case this project I've been working on since last year ;) There are 2 screen recordings [here](https://github.com/stepbrobd/inc/issues/112) and the NixOS module implementation for the search engine is [here](https://github.com/stepbrobd/inc/blob/master/modules/nixos/n...) The code search engine reusing [zoekt](https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt) as library (in the module, its the api backend but the stock web interface is quite usable) and [neogrok](https://github.com/isker/neogrok) as frontend

In Declarative Git repo sync/migration tool and self hosted code search engine

auszeph·Apr 10, 2026

https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt Run a copy of this in the same VPC. Monorepos would definitely help, but that's not the structure we have. I didn't want to rely on API limits (or stability) at GitHub for such a core feature. Using this we've had agents find dead APIs across multiple repos that can be cleaned up and the like. Very useful.

In Launch HN: Twill.ai (YC S25) – Delegate to cloud agents, get back PRs

esafak·Mar 29, 2026

How does it compare with https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt ?

In Spot – Git repo code search, replace, diff and merge

sluongng·Dec 5, 2025

> They use Google's web indexing technology adapted for trigrams, which was mostly developed to support their massive internal monorepo Do you have a source for this? I would love to read more about it. In the doc of the Zoekt repo, it says > What does cs.bazel.build run on? > Currently, it runs on a single Google Cloud VM with 16 vCPUs, 60G RAM and an attached physical SSD. https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/blob/main/doc/faq.md#wh... so at least they were using Zoekt up until a certain point in the past.

In Fast trigram based code search

cv_h·Dec 5, 2025Submission

Fast trigram based code search

49 points · Open discussion

spmurrayzzz·Oct 2, 2024

Not the author, but given that this is a relatively small UI wrapper of a zoekt[1] backend, it seems like the risk here is isolated to the upstream Sourcegraph-maintained search dependency. By relatively small, I mean that the total SLOC for UI code in the entire project is around ~3.5k (compared to the backend which is currently 25x the size). Seems difficult to ascribe any enterprise motivations given that and additionally the UI seems very useful as-is even if you had to fork it and build a new community from there. [1] https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt

In Show HN: Sourcebot, an open-source Sourcegraph alternative

maxloh·Oct 2, 2024

Zoekt already has its own UI, though it is very feature-limited and lacks syntax highlighting. Demo: https://cs.bazel.build/ If you’re curious about the source, as I was, here it is: https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/blob/main/web/templates...

In Show HN: Sourcebot, an open-source Sourcegraph alternative

bshzzle·Oct 1, 2024Submission

Show HN: Sourcebot, an open-source Sourcegraph alternative

Hi HN, We’re Brendan and Michael, the creators of Sourcebot (https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot). Sourcebot is an open-source code search tool that allows you to quickly search across many large codebases. Check out our demo video here: https://youtu.be/mrIFYSB_1F4, or try it for yourself on our demo site here: https://demo.sourcebot.dev While at prior roles, we’ve both felt the pain of searching across hundreds of multi-million line codebases. Using local tools like grep were ill-suited since you often only had a handful of codebases checked out at a time. Sourcegraph (https://sourcegraph.com/) solves this issue by indexing a collection of codebases in the background and exposing a web-based search interface. It is the de-facto search solution for medium to large orgs, but is often cited as expensive ($49 per user / month) and re

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cently went closed source (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41296481). That’s why we built Sourcebot. We designed Sourcebot to be: - Easily deployed: we provide a single, self-contained Docker image (https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot/pkgs/container/so...). - Fast & scalable: designed to minimize search times (current average is ~73ms) across many large repositories. - Cross code-host support: we currently support syncing public & private repositories in GitHub and GitLab. - Quality UI: we like to think that a good looking dev-tool is more pleasant to use. - Open source: Sourcebot is free to use by anyone. Under the hood, we use Zoekt (https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt) as our code search engine, which was originally authored by Han-Wen Nienhuys and now maintained by Sourcegraph (https://sourcegraph.com/blog/sourcegraph-accepting-zoekt-mai...). Zoekt works by building a trigram index from the source code enabling extremely fast regular expression matching. Russ Cox has a great article on how trigram indexes work if you’re interested: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html In the shorter-term, there are several improvements we want to make, like: - Improving how we communicate indexing progress (this is currently non-existent so it’s not obvious how long things will take) - UX improvements like search history, query syntax highlighting & suggestions, etc. - Small QOL improvements like bookmarking code snippets. - Support for more code hosts (e.g., BitBucket, SourceForge, ADO, etc.) In the longer-term, we want to investigate how we could go beyond just traditional code search by leveraging machine learning to enable experiences like semantic code search (“where is system X located?”) and code explanations (”how does system X interact with system Y?”). You could think of this as a copilot being embedded into Sourcebot. Our hunch is that will be useful to devs, especially when packaged with the traditional code search, but let us know what you think. Give it a try: https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot. Cheers!

259 points · Open discussion

maxmcd·Sep 30, 2024

I have also been thinking about this: https://slatedb.io/ is new and KV on object storage. Maybe helpful. There is lots of similar work over ipfs, I have not had the chance to experiment yet, but I'd like to see what a workflow is like with (eg): summa: https://github.com/izihawa/summa I tried to implement trigram search on object storage using Zoekt: https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt, but I found that common queries load 30-40% of the entire index, so setting it up without some kind of caching strategy felt a little ridiculous.

In Build a serverless ACID database with this one neat trick (atomic PutIfAbsent)

isker·Apr 10, 2024

Hound has made an interesting choice to not bound searches. https://codesearch.wmcloud.org/search/?q=test&files=&exclude... produces an ajax request that (for me) took 13s to produce a 55MB JSON response, and then takes many more seconds to render into the DOM. Properly bounding search response sizes was one of the things I had to ensure Zoekt could do in its JSON APIs that I use in neogrok: https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/pull/615

In Code search is hard

hanwenn·Nov 21, 2023

Russ Cox' trigram approach uses document IDs for the posting list, which makes the index much smaller, but gives less precise (ie. slower) matching. This is mentioned in the design doc at https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/blob/main/doc/design.md....

In Code Search at Google: Han-Wen and Zoekt

tromp·Nov 21, 2023

Wondering how this tool got named after the Dutch verb for seek, I found this quote on its github page [1]. > "Zoekt, en gij zult spinazie eten" - Jan Eertink > ("seek, and ye shall eat spinach" - My primary school teacher) [1] https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt

In Code Search at Google: Han-Wen and Zoekt

ilaksh·Aug 27, 2023

https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt seems to be doing a fair amount of heavy lifting for Cody.

In Cody – The AI that knows your entire codebase

smarx007·Jul 4, 2023

What is a good open-source system for code search if I want to plug 100 or so git repos into it and have it available over the web? GH search is not desirable because it would search too broadly and would not cover repos on Gitlab etc. I looked at the Debian code search [1] in the past, but for some reason thought it required a bit too much effort and didn't complete my investigation of it. Though [2] looks pretty approachable. Sourcegraph mentioned Zoekt [3], but I am not sure how usable it is. If it was pretty good, why did Sourcegraph OSS exist? Finally, from all the discussion how Sourcegraph OSS was very behind in the past few years, I guess there is no serious plan to fork it? Edit: GCS release [4] seems to have been open-sourced without a frontend. Edit2: Livegrep [5] and Opengrok [6] were recommended higher in the thread. Quite ex

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cited to try them out but if someone has working Docker Compose configs, I would be very thankful for the head start. Edit3: there is also Eureka [7]. Seems less powerful but easier to deploy. [1]: https://github.com/Debian/dcs [2]: https://github.com/Debian/dcs/blob/main/howto/building.md [3]: https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt [4]: https://github.com/google/codesearch [5]: https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep [6]: https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ [7]: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/eureka

In Sourcegraph is no longer open source

rattray·Jul 4, 2023

Of note, they mention (ordering/emphasis mine): > We remain committed to Zoekt, the open source code search engine, and will continue to upstream changes to it. https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt > The source code will remain publicly available. > Individual devs will still be able to use Sourcegraph for free on public code at sourcegraph.com and within our self-hosted free tier on private code. > Very few individual devs or companies used the limited variant of code search that was open source. The vast majority (99.9%+) used the enterprise product. Maintaining two variants going forward was a big burden on our engineering team that had very little benefit for users.

In Sourcegraph is no longer open source