Just Krugle it

INTERNET

Programmers can now Krugle, and thus find just the code they're looking for.

Developers may no longer need to Google search for code. They spend anywhere between 20-25 per cent of their time looking for code and related information. It can be very frustrating.

Finding and sharing code with search engines like Google or Yahoo (which index billions of pages; Google alone, 11 billion) may just become easier with the launch of Krugle, a new search engine for programmers, next month.

Krugle, which will release its beta version on March 8 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. And though the name rhymes with the familiar, it is a derivative of the name of the founder and CTO, Ken Krugler.

The index will cover around 100 million pages of what Krugler terms the "technical web". Unlike a regular search engine, Krugle will only index pages which contain technical stuff.

"Many people do use traditional search engines to search for code, but the process is too time consuming. Krugle is much faster, much more convenient and the results are optimised for programmers. Unlike traditional search engines, Krugle delivers the code with all the formatting and syntax intact, making it easy to view and evaluate," says Don Thorson, vice-president, marketing, Krugle.

Traditional search engines do not search code repositories and archives "" among the richest sources. Apart from easing code navigation (say, from "Apache" to "Tomcat"), Krugle also provides a way for programmers to make annotations to the code.

As you proceed through a search session, Krugle creates tabbed "pages" for each result viewed. This makes flipping back and forth between code and related information easy. When the search is complete, you can close less useful pages and save the others in a "content bundle" for later reference.

Krugle also lets you add your own comments to entire code files or specific lines of code, allowing for useful code-centric communication between developers.

There are other source-code search engines like Koders and Codefetch. However, Thorson argues that Krugle is a vertical search engine that lets you search highly relevant non-code technical information as well.

"Krugle also allows users to save and share their search results with other programmers. It's this combination of Krugle features which make it uniquely useful," he says.