Search Engine For Coders to Launch

karvind writes "According to Wired, 'Krugle' is set to next month. The search engine indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge, and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. The index will contain between 3 and 5 terabytes of code by the time the engine launches in March. According to article, Krugle also contains intelligence to help it parse code and to differentiate programming languages, so a PHP developer could search for a website-registration system written in PHP simply by typing 'PHP registration system.'" Update: 02/17 21:04 GMT by Z : Summary edited for accuracy.

Comments

Regexp?

[MatthewParker]

Regexp searches would be great, but I imagine too much processing required? --- http://gmailskins.mozdev.org/

Rock!

[AKAImBatman]

This could so seriously rock. Every time I need a library to do a specific function, I always have to do some searching to find all of the competing options. Invariably, at least a couple of options get missed as you sort through the excess nonsense and out of date information. (Sometimes it's the best solution that gets missed.) I can't count how many times I've wished there was a simpler way to get all the competing options.

And then there's the issue of missing modules that are referenced by other code. Usually you have to find them by trial and error. In a code search engine, (theoretically) it will simply come back with all instances of the constant I put in. Which means that I can locate the missing module faster than ever before!

If this works, Google will have seriously made the lives of thousands of programmers that much easier. :-)

Kawahee's 2 cents

[Kawahee]

First off, it's not Google.

Secondly, I believe "PHP registration system", or the example given in the summary is a sufficient enough query for Google to return something relevant anyway.

Beware of SEO

[GrAfFiT]

Does this mean that in a few years we'll get the equivalent of SEO, search engine spamming in every program we can compile ? I don't want to see that.
Nowadays, websites are made for Google.. Their existence is justified by their PageRank.
I don't want SourceForge et al. to die the same death as Yahoo's old categories (did you notice that they completely disappeared ?).

Costs?

[AuMatar]

Any idea on what this service will cost? I couldn't find it on the website.

Also, they really need the ability to search based on license. If I'm working on a GPL project, using it and finding Apache licensed code is only of minimum help. (I can base work off of it, but I can't just use it).

What I'd like.. Google with regex

[matt me]

What I've always wanted is to use Google properly, with full regex functionality, see Perl. Currently Google gives you ten terms (I call them words), allowing you to quote some, and use a single-level of AND and OR. And excludes, but these eat away at the ten word limit speedily.

I want wildcards .* and to be able to escape punctuation! It may look like a cartoon character swearing, but for those that can, it would give us way more power.

Re:Where does it say that Google is launching it?

[Otter]

More accurately -- "the company about to get sued by Google". In fact, Zonk may have just given Google's lawyers Exhibit A on proving "confusingly similar".

Re:Community?

[Ruberik]

- merge with semantic web work to be able to search on higher level concepts (e.g. if I type "bubble sort" it returns all bubble sorting code even if it doesn't explicitly say "bubble sort" anywhere)

And after that, you could search for "given the initial input, code that terminates"! That would be awesome.

This is hilarious :)

[Z0mb1eman]

This story never would've made it if it wasn't submitted as "Google launches"... now we're left with a slashvertisment for a rather ugly site desperately trying to be Web2.0-looking and that "is set to next month", a whole bunch of posts pointing out that it has nothing to do with Google that are unfortunately now getting modded off-topic, another bunch of posts linking to koders.com, and nothing of substance to talk about.

I love Slashdot :) /take notes for when I'll need to generate "buzz" for a product launch

Access confidential code!

[labreuer]

For example, confidential Novell code. (In case that link doesn't work, search for "StopWatch" in "C#"; there are only two results.)

Will this new site perform such wonders?

Bet on a Buyout

[moochfish]

It might not be BY google as a bunch of people have already repeated corrected, but this seems like a very logical company google would buy.