The order bound on generalized Hamming weights is introduced in a general setting of codes on varieties which comprises both the one point geometric Goppa codes as well as the q-ary Reed-Muller codes. For the latter codes it is shown that this bound is sharp and that they satisfy the double chain condition.

By means of local search techniques, five quasi-cyclic codes have been found that have a higher minimum distance than known binary linear codes. The new codes have parameters [102,17,37], [60,20,17], [84,21,27], [105,21,36], and [100,25,30]. Also, 39 other quasi-cyclic codes have been found that improve the parameter sets of previously known quasi-cyclic codes. Twenty-four of them give a new and easier description of binary linear codes with best known parameters.