Google have a billion different projects, many of which never see much success. But the latest thing is indexing source code and making it searchable. So say you want a sorting function in... Ada, and you don't want to write it yourself, you can just search for it. It also has info for licenses, so you can look for code under a license that you can safely use.

On a far more trivial note, you can search for names. My name turns up what is probably the most trivial software "release" I've ever done, the two files in this blog entry. There is more code out there that has my name on it, like galleryforge, but that hasn't been indexed. Other names, like Linus Torvalds turn up more matches (in his case only 50), whereas others still, like Bill Gates, only mentions the person in the source, but not as an author of the code. (Which is not that shocking, since Bill isn't eminent for his open source activities.)

In any case, Google Code Search is a pretty cool resource!