New search engine tracks open source code

Open source ISV, Krugle claims to have solved the problem of developers spending a quarter or more of their time searching for lines of code to perform certain functions that may already exist.

Co-founder and chief technology officer, Ken Krugler says there's no sense in writing code that's already been written. He said Krugle is designed to soothe this pain point for developers.

Kruge aspires to be the Google of software code search, even referring to itself as a verb. And recently, it has started to become the go-to search site for open source developers, partnering with key websites, including SourceForge.net, the leading repository for open-source software projects, to embed Krugle search. Krugle also announced a similar partnership with CollabNet, a community of 1 million developers.

Developers typically visit SourceForge to find a project similar to the one they're doing. But they end up having to download the whole project. Krugle lets them search through the project to see if it fits the bill without downloading it entirely.

Krugle gives software developers one thing they need most, time, says John Andrews, chief executive of research firm, Evans Data.

"If you could shave 10% of that [search] time off, that is a huge productivity improvement either in costs savings, revenue generation or just spare time," Andrews says.

Google is still the first stop for many open source developers, but as the volume of open source code grows, as companies use more open source for development internally and as more software companies open their previously proprietary code, Google may not be able to keep up, says Andrews.

Krugle's next venture will be search for open source development within enterprises: an enterprise product currently in beta is slated for general release in the second half of 2007.

www.krugle.com

Source: ComputerWorld UK