Neat things do come of it though. Code Search, for example, ended up as an technical explanation [1], which I found fascinating, and example implementation [2], which I found useful.

[1] http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html [2] http://code.google.com/p/codesearch/

That's not actually the codebase for code search though -- it's a re-implementation of it done in the original authors new language.

That's my point though: just because a retired product is heavily tied to Google's infrastructure doesn't mean that they couldn't release something useful out of it.

This is a great read, thank you for posting it!