Googling for Software Development: What Developers Search For and What They Find (MSR 2021)

Developers often search for software resources on the web. In practice, instead of going directly to websites (e.g., Stack Overflow), they rely on search engines (e.g., Google). Despite this being a common activity, we are not yet aware of what developers search from the perspective of popular software development websites and what search results are returned. With this knowledge, we can understand real-world queries, developers’ needs, and the query impact on the search results. In this paper, we provide an empirical study to understand what developers search on the web and what they find. We assess 1.3M queries to popular programming websites and we perform thousands of queries on Google to explore search results. We find that (i) developers’ queries typically start with keywords (e.g., Python, Android, etc.), are short (3 words), tend to omit functional words, and are similar among each other; (ii) minor changes to queries do not largely affect the Google search results, however, some cosmetic changes may have a non-negligible impact; and (iii) search results are dominated by Stack Overflow, but YouTube is also a relevant source nowadays. We conclude by presenting detailed implications for researchers and developers.