I'm wondering if it is possible to search for html using google.
In other words I want to be able to search for the html that makes up
the web page rather than the information the way it is presented via a
browser.

For example I might want to search to find a bit of code like "<map
name="mlNavMap">" to see examples of how this code is used in
practise.

Is this technically possible?
Can it be done through a search engine or maybe some sort of software??

I can't be entirely sure this is the definitive answer but in my
knowledge it is not possible to use google to search the source code
of a page. I believe when google crawls a page, it indexes all the
text that is displayed so it will be returned for relevant search
results but the underlying html is not indexed and therefore not
searchable.

If you've got some money to burn then a program like Web Scraper could
do the trick. Its your very own web spider that will crawl any list of
pages you want it to and you can then set it to search through those
pages for the html you're looking for.

hiya thanks for that that pretty much qualifies as an answer.
I now know i need to find some form of data mining program like this
(but maybe cheaper) so thanks for that.
Ryan

p.s. If you post that as an anwwer i'll credit you with answering it.
thanks again
ryan

If you're looking for source code examples, you can try to use
http://koders.com .  It's an incredibly awesome resource for searching
source to just about any language, though I'm not sure if they have
html. It's worth a look anyways.