First, let me make an honest disclosure: I'm not a programmer. I don't even play one on the Internet (well, not normally). But you don't really need to be a programmer to go through and understand most of the features of this service, thanks to Google's clean interface. And that's as good a place to start as any.

Here you see a screen shot of part of the Google Project Hosting home page (http://code.google.com/hosting/). Below the link that says "Sign in with your Gmail account to create a project" are four other links. One of these leads to the discussion group (http://groups.google.com/group/google-code-hosting) for Google Project Hosting. What I cut out on the left was some navigation for Google Code that leads you to some related areas (Google APIs, Google Summer of Code, and so on).

Back to the screen shot. You'll note that Google has added the classic open source motto: "Release early, release often." It's a nice touch, even if some observers commenting on the service think Google took it a little too much to heart with this. You'll also note that there's a list of project labels below the search box. I'll talk more about project labels shortly; for now, know that you can click on one of those labels and pull up projects that have been tagged with them. You can also use the search box, of course.

If you do click on a label, you get results that look very similar to normal search engine results. Each project's title is in blue and hyperlinked to the project itself; a summary of varying length is included below the title; and then, below the summary, you'll see a set of green links. These are all the labels that the project has been given by the project administrator. Now you can see that these work rather like keywords; click on any label, and Google does a new search of the projects. If that doesn't suit your needs, don't fret; after you do the search, the search box acquires another button next to the one labeled "Search Projects." The new one is labeled "Search the Web."

Okay, now you know how to search Google's repository. Let's take a look at how difficult it is to create a project.