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Search Engine For Coders to Launch

Posted by Zonk on Fri Feb 17, 2006 03:55 PM
from the sounds-codetacular dept.
Programming IT Technology
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.
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  • Works well already. (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub (11606) <slashdot@grub.net> on Friday February 17 2006, @03:57PM (#14745031) Homepage Journal

    Results <b>1 - 10</b> of about 893,795,000 for "/* I hate working at EA */"

  • Where does it say that Google is launching it? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by frangipani (729691) on Friday February 17 2006, @03:57PM (#14745037)
    This sounds like a new company, not a product of Google.

  • koders (Score:5, Informative)

    by andy314159pi (787550) on Friday February 17 2006, @03:58PM (#14745052) Journal
    There is already a pretty big repository that is easily searchable:
    http://www.koders.com/ [koders.com]

  • Already done (Score:4, Informative)

    by unixmaster (573907) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:00PM (#14745072) Homepage Journal
    http://www.koders.com/ [koders.com]

  • Good for Sony! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Vinnie_333 (575483) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:00PM (#14745073)
    This will make it so much easier for Sony's programmers ....
  • Regexp searches would be great, but I imagine too much processing required? --- http://gmailskins.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]

  • Uh oh... (Score:3, Funny)

    by gabecubbage (711618) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:02PM (#14745105)
    This is a spectacularly bad idea...

    I estimate only three days before someone successfully compiles Krugle on a shiny new Mactelnix box and ushers in the Singularity overnight, and twenty years ahead of schedule.

    "I'm sorry Sergey... I'm afraid I can't do that..."

  • Community? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by binaryDigit (557647) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:03PM (#14745107)
    Some other interesting features above and beyond simple searching could be:

    - 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).

    - "community" features that allow developers to leave comments on code (no, not comments _in_ code, but on code, similar to epinions et al).

    - if this index is available via api like the main google index, then people could do things like have automated lint type tools.

    - code chain. If I search for some code, then it'd be nice to be able to then peruse that codes hierarchy within the search engine (vs having to download it or cvs over to it).
    • Coder: Enter search string: bubble sort
      Search Engine: Here are some Quick Sorts, only newbs use bubble sort!

      Coder: Damn AI !!!!

    • - 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 [wikipedia.org].

  • nothing new (Score:3, Informative)

    by Krunch (704330) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:04PM (#14745114) Homepage
    Koders [koders.com] does that for some times now.

  • Rock! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AKAImBatman (238306) <akaimbatman.gmail@com> on Friday February 17 2006, @04:04PM (#14745115) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kawahee (901497) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:04PM (#14745117) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GrAfFiT (802657) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:04PM (#14745120) Homepage
    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? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AuMatar (183847) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:06PM (#14745131)
    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).
    • InfoWorld had coverage of this a few days ago. [infoworld.com] The company and product were unveiled at the recent DEMO conference, which is a show where start-ups get to pitch their idea in front of a bunch of investors and venture capitalists. They envision two potential models: using advertising to sponsor the site, and also potentially selling their software to companies that do a lot of in-house development for use behind their own firewalls.
  • So they get into another niche. This is troubling, let me explain.

    Let's say I have a website that allows for searching of source code and I display google ads. Google looks at the traffic and revenue then decides to compete with me using their own service. So the question is, why do people display google ads? The money's good now but google could very well get into your business and wipe you out if it does too well and they notice.

    IMO, they should either do advertising and stick with that and nothing else,
    • given the revision of this thread topic things are a bit different but the reasoning stays the same, google could still enter this space if you give them your ad traffic and they deem it profitable enough to compete with you, puting links to their competitor before your search results.
    • A anti-libertarian who is paranoid? say it isn't so! Google's messing with advertising makes them look bad, but think about their other options. If Google went straight to advertising only, everyone would just assume they were as bad as doubleclick. I cant think of one advertiser that is legitamite, and at least when google puts adds off their own site it doesn't seem to cloud things.

      Google only makes money by advertising at the moment, and they cant hardly give it up. They certianly cannot go to all ad
      • but when you're giving them your traffic patterns/sales/etc via analytics then providing them with your effective CPM/CPC and of course impressions and clicks via adsense, then they have a better idea vs if you just didn't go through them.
  • There's no "bash" or "bourne shell" listed in the drop-down box.

    Which is unfortunate since I need a snippet to make my fielded read loop ignore comments and I'm lazy.

    Ah, well.

  • Later in the year... (Score:3, Funny)

    by DrEldarion (114072) * on Friday February 17 2006, @04:08PM (#14745143) Homepage
    They're also planning on releasing "kringle", a search engine for presents, but they're currently in litigation with a "Dr. Claus".

  • The Wired article title "Here Comes a Google for Coders" maybe caused the confusion. I guess the use of "a google" to mean "a search engine" was maybe a confusing choice.
  • ...till Microsoft, SAP, SCO (remember them?) etc start polluting this repository with proprietary code?

    Jaysyn
  • Since it isn't at all Google, how soon until the real Google sues its soundalike search engine Krugle for infringement?

  • What I'd like.. Google with regex (Score:3, Insightful)

    by matt me (850665) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:18PM (#14745212)
    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.
  • At last, a google repository that won't be dominated by porn and blog results*...

    unless you count Google News, Froogle, Maps, Catalogs, and a few others... but really, who's counting!!!

  • Bah. (Score:3, Funny)

    by BigZaphod (12942) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:19PM (#14745223) Homepage
    What I really want is a code engine that let's me type: "the misguided and hopeless project I'm working on" in the search box and then delivers the finished executable and documentation so I can email it to my boss and go home early.

  • Filtering out buggy code (Score:5, Funny)

    by ewg (158266) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:25PM (#14745269)
    I hope you can add -buggy to your query to filter out all the buggy code.

  • This is hilarious :) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Z0mb1eman (629653) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:35PM (#14745344) Homepage
    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! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by labreuer (950633) on Friday February 17 2006, @04:39PM (#14745360) Homepage

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

    Will this new site perform such wonders?

  • What does it have over koders dot com? (Score:3, Informative)

    by delire (809063) on Friday February 17 2006, @05:03PM (#14745537)


    Works well for me [koders.com]

    A wider breadth of supported languages would be nice however.

    That said if Krugle doesn't have the ability to filter on a per license basis, it will not be practical (or safe) for many.

  • DWIM() (Score:5, Funny)

    by EatHam (597465) on Friday February 17 2006, @05:13PM (#14745635)
    Now I'll finally be able to find that Do What I Mean function I've been searching for.
  • http://www.codefetch.com/ [codefetch.com] is a search engine that searches a very useful collection of code: the source code from programming books.

    Neither koders nor krugle cover that, plus codefetch searches the APIs of several languages, java, ruby, php, for example.

    Finally, unlike koders, codefetch lets you do a true full-text search, just like in a text editor-- go ahead, search for "+=" and you can even use a few regular expressions.
  • 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.
    • Krugle (created by Ken Krugler - notice the name?) is in no way, shape or form affiliated with Google.
      Which will delay Google's trademark infringement suit for, what, a few milliseconds?

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