Here Comes a Google for Coders
For most people, open source is a synonym for free software. But for programmers, open source is about sharing code, building on the work of others and not having to reinvent the wheel — at least, that’s the ideal. In practice, code reuse remains very low, because it’s often too hard for programmers to find relevant bits of code for their applications.
A new search engine for programmers promises to alleviate that problem by making it easier to find and share code. That in turn could increase programmers’ productivity and give a fresh boost to the open-source movement.
Krugle, which launches officially next month, 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 cover around 100 million pages of what company founder Ken Krugler terms the “technical web” — high-quality technical pages for professional programmers. (By contrast, Google’s index covers about 11 billion pages.)
“This winds up being a window on all the open-source code in the world,” said Krugler, who estimates the Krugle index will contain between 3 and 5 terabytes of code by the time the engine launches in March.