Criteo uses Sourcegraph universal code search to tackle Big Code

Founded in France in 2005, Criteo partners with retailers to recommend products to potential customers through ad retargeting. The company has massive volumes of data stored in its on-premise servers, along with millions of lines of code that developers work on in both Paris and the U.S.

Criteo has a heterogeneous ecosystem with thousands of repositories. When working on a single repository, developers use their IDE for code search. But for teams that are cross-functional or work in multiple repositories, this small-scale search strategy isn't sufficient and can be a major time sink.

“Before Sourcegraph, we were struggling to search code in an accurate and timely manner. The legacy text-based search we relied on had security issues, and its performance was poor in terms of the quality of searches and response times.”

“When looking for alternatives, the general consensus was 'If you're a giant like Google, you can simply build your own code search engine. If that's not you, then buy Sourcegraph.”

Prioritize developer happiness and productivity follows

“At Criteo, developer happiness is our top priority—not just productivity. We want to tackle the things that developers see as hurdles in their day-to-day life. By providing them with the right tools, like Sourcegraph, we've found that increased productivity is a natural byproduct.”

Sourcegraph serves as Criteo's one-stop shop for searching across all of its codebases, making its employees' lives that much easier. Criteo relies on many different ecosystems for different teams, and Sourcegraph now provides the ability to cross boundaries of different codebases and different languages authored by different people with different tools.

Developers start with a query, then use the recommended filters to narrow their search until they locate the piece of code that is of interest. “Sometimes they don't even know what they're looking for—perhaps just patterns that need to be deprecated. With our previous tools, the results were not good,” said François Jehl.

Survey says Sourcegraph is the ultimate time-saver

Criteo conducted an internal survey with Sourcegraph early adopters to determine how Sourcegraph has impacted its developers' workflows. The survey found that 83 percent of those developers used Sourcegraph every single day, and nearly two-thirds used it several times per day.

55 percent of respondents said Sourcegraph saved them a few dozen minutes per day, while 18 percent stated they saved over an hour per day.

“The feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive. We had employees saying 'I've dreamt of a tool like Sourcegraph!', 'Please buy it!', 'It saved my life!', 'It literally saved me hours per day!' We're thrilled that it's given us the ability to make our developers happier and more productive in their roles.”

As codebases grow larger, Sourcegraph will continue to serve as the backbone to help developers at Criteo quickly search through code to understand what's happening within its ecosystem.

“The quality of the Sourcegraph UI and its code intelligence are two game-changer features for us. It's like having an online IDE for browsing code.”