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.

Works well already.

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?

This sounds like a new company, not a product of Google.

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

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".

koders

There is already a pretty big repository that is easily searchable:
http://www.koders.com/ [koders.com]

Re:koders

I was going to make a smart-ass comment about it not having lame [sourceforge.net], but turns out that it does [koders.com]

Re:koders

http://www.codefetch.com/ [codefetch.com] searches a very useful collection of code: the source code from programming books.

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

Nothing to do with Google

Krugle is a sound-alike/llok-alike startup business with no apparent relationship with google.

Already done

http://www.koders.com/ [koders.com]

Good for Sony!

This will make it so much easier for Sony's programmers ....

Regexp?

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

Good one slashdot.....

No where on the Krugle web page or on the Wired story does it say anything about Krugle being a product of Google. It just says that it will be like "Google for code".

You don't think our paranoia about Google taking over the world could be going a little too far??

Uh oh...

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?

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).

nothing new

Koders [koders.com] does that for some times now.

Rock!

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

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

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 ?).

Correction

The article did not mention that Google was launching this search engine. And looking at Krugle's website, it looks suspiciously spam-a-licious.

Costs?

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).

Google doing a lot, too much?

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, or get into providing content while not having an affilaite network. Only fools advertise with google IMO. The money might be good now but be wary if you do too well.

Limited languages at present

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...

They're also planning on releasing "kringle", a search engine for presents, but they're currently in litigation with a "Dr. Claus".

err, i don't think it's from google

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.

Well, at least IP lawyers will be happy

I imagine proprietary coders using this and IP lawyers doing research on this.

Hopefully, chaos won't ensue.

So how long....

...till Microsoft, SAP, SCO (remember them?) etc start polluting this repository with proprietary code?

Jaysyn

Lawsuit!

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

koders.com

Do you know koders.com ? It's a cool code search engine !

What I'd like.. Google with regex

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.

finally...

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.

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

I hope you can add -buggy to your query to filter out all the buggy code.

This is hilarious :)

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!

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?

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()

Now I'll finally be able to find that Do What I Mean function I've been searching for.

www.codefetch.com is another resource

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.

Bet on a Buyout

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.

"Borrowed" text from Google Privacy Policy

These guys want to be like Google so much they even "borrowed" some of Google's text for their privacy policy:

Krugle Privacy Page [krugle.com]

Google Privacy Page [google.com]

Can you specify License type in search?

I did RTFA, but didn't see any mention of being able to limit the search by license type. If you're working on a project that you intend to distribute under the GPL, you probably don't want your search results cluttered with code that has more restrictive terms.

I also think that licensing terms might be a useful addition to self-documenting commenting schemes such as Javadoc...

"Please retype your email" Registrations

Why ? When we all end up just copy+paste'ing teh first one.

$1,500,000 in funding to show ads...

...to people that won't look at them.

I have thought about this a lot because I have some detailed plans for implementing a superficially similar system. I have looked at a list of similar existing sites, like Koders, CodeFetch, jdocs, etc. I haven't looked at Krugle yet because they only grant access to people that think will help them in their extensive pre-launch publicity campaign. Krugle-related announcements, all with basically the same rehashed non-information, have appeared all over the internet (Digg, Infoworld, numerous blogs). Whoever runs Krugle's marketing program should get a raise. This is basically "PR 2.0" and we will, unfortunately, be subjected to it by many companies from now on.

AFAICT, the existing sites like this that are trying to make money seem to base everything on the idea that they can get programmers to click advertisements in the search results. But, there is no group in the world that is better at ignoring online advertisements than (open-source) programmers. Plus, some of the ads are really ridiculous. For example, on jdocs.com, the first ads I noticed were for _illegal street racing videos_ (no joke!). On the other hand, some of these sites have been around for a while, so perhaps the advertising model works better than I think.

Having said _that_, they still have to compete with Google. Just like google has google.com/linux, they could easily add google.com/code. Even the normal Google search is pretty effective at finding code (I mean, SEO companies rarely use keywords like GetNextFileName or SwingUtilities.invokeLater).

So, these code-search companies would have to have major value-added features. To be honest, what I've heard about Krugle makes me think that they have yet to come up with such compelling features. And, if they make you sign up to access them, then the value of their advertised features decreases significantly.

In fact, it will be interesting to see if anybody can come up with the features that I think would compel people to use and even _pay_ to use such a system. I can think of several such features that I would pay for access to. But, I am not sure that it is profitable for anybody to sell them to me at a price I will pay. Plus, there are quite a few political roadblocks to implementing them.

Now...if only more where brave like this...

We would finally have something useful.

Biggest problem today such as I see it - is the garbage you have to fight with Google. I am not a scientist per see, but an avid hobbyist that loves information, and when I do my experiments as the neighbourhood mad-wannabee-scientist, I have to sift trough gazillions of annoying websites that "wants" to be no.1 for everything.

What I want is:

- A SPAM free search engine (Spam = pr0n ads, ads, look-ma-its-me-on-the-web) etc.
- An research search engine with ONLY useful documentation

Darn...Im dreaming.

Before pubbing on Krugle

make sure you save your code to a CD or DVD and mail it in to the Library of Congress, securing your copyright to it.

Or copyleft it.

But even though your right of copyright remains with the author by creation, never assume unregistered code won't be stolen by someone like Gill B at Microsnuff who believes all code is his ...

Let's be careful out there.

Google is useful for searching code

A friend recently asked me about Python's thread.start_new_thread. Google is perfect for finding hundreds of examples. Try this query:

filetype:py thread.start_new_thread [google.com]

. The syntactical portions come up in the results, and you can copy those to your clipboard to then find the exact thing you're looking for in context in the source. A similar search on Koders [koders.com], a search engine supposedly specializing in source code search, returns useless results.

microsoft

no excuses for M$ this year!

How about this library of code snippets...

http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/ [bigbold.com] seems to be catching on a bit.

Google

I really wish Google would allow you to search for characters like +, ;, [], etc. It is virtually impossible to search for source because it simply drops all of your symbols.

First impression

I see the designers of Flock [flock.com] are up to their old tricks again...

Only one Concern

There is only one thing I worry about with this, and it's the same problem as google:
Horribly
Outdated
Code

"Hey look guys, Krugle says that 5.0.4 has been announced."
"...that happened 6 months ago, not to mention came out."

So what's new?

I could get 356314000 hits with the source code already when I type in an error message (instead of the much needed answer to "what do I do with this then?"). I don't need another search engine for that...

Now this may seem silly . . .

but does it cover COBOL?

Re:NOT google

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?

Re:Google launches?

Offtopic?? Did you even read the post, let alone the article?

According to Wired, Google is going to launch Krugle next month.

No. Wired does not say that. Krugle does not say that. I read the krugle site, I searched the krugle blog. It's just not true.

To be fair, it's clear that the poster didn't read the article either.

Re:Google launches?

Every time a new search engine appears automatically it compared with the best-there-is.
When google started it was compared with yahoo!

If it looks like a duck (google) , quacks like a duck and walks like a duck (behaves like a search engine), then it is a duck.

Wrong....
this is not duck-typing, this is real world, where a new search engine is just a new search engine (and not a google duck)