Koders is a code search engine which enables developers to easily search and browse source code hosted on thousands of open source repositories.
Krugle (which sounds like Google) is yet another search engine focused on developers and intends to make code search easier and faster.
One of the nice features about this search engine is the additional information displayed along with the search results.
There is a section which displays Code snippets from Safari Books Online. It also displays the related Open Source Projects and related Tech Pages.
Also the links within the search page as tabs and this way you don’t end up cluttering your browser.
However the search engine itself was not up to my expectation. After seeing Scoble talk high of the search engine, I took it for a test drive.
Test 1
Search Keyword : Convert String to int
Language : Java
Results: The search results listed all files having name as Convert.java and having String in the code text
Test 2
Search Keyword : parse xml/parse XML
Language : Java
Search Result : No results !!
Krugle couldn’t return any results !! Remove the space from the search keyword (parsexml) and this time Krugle is able to return some results, but not useful results !!
I ran the same keyword search on Koders and Google and these engines came up with better results.
I am not saying that Krugle is totally hopeless. The problem with Krugle and couple of other code search engines is the way they filter the search result. They map keywords to the file name as seen in “Convert.java” scenario.
In case of Java language, the Javadoc is one place where lot of information about a method is given and this could definitely be indexed and used for returning good search results.
If you want to know more about Krugle check these resources
Demo and Interview (via Scoble)
P.S. I haven’t gone through these videos and screencasts. If you do go through, probably you will learn as to how to use Krugle and how to input the right keywords to get the best result out of the engine !
Comments on this entry are closed.
Hi Venu,
Thanks for giving Krugle a try. I blogged about your tests here at Krugle.
Short summary – your first test is an example of trying to do semantic search in code, which rarely works well (or at least not without some extra work to restrict the search to just comments).
Your second test exposed a bug in our query parser – thanks!
— Ken
Thanks Krugler for analyzing the problems and its very nice to know you guys are listening to user feedback.
As mentioned in my blog I never checked in detail the features of Krugle and “Find in Comments” did throw up good results. (I will do it 🙂 )
However I am interested in knowing how krugle gives priority when you select “Found in -> Any Area”.
I was seeing that for a search “Convert String to int”, the engine was giving more priority to the “functions” in the first page of results.
Probably Krugle can give the top results of each search domain i.e Functions,Source Code,Function call etc. Or there can be option (checkbox) to do this, I believe it might provide better results in the first page.