Long have I been preaching the benefits of IT Conversations (I added their feed to the sidebar, in case you were wondering!) for great technology podcasts. This one, by Ken Krugler, caught my fancy though.
It was the first time I had heard of “Code Search” by a company named Krugle. This search engine prides itself on allowing a exploratory search by users. Need a bit of code or a white paper on how to use it, check Krugle. Right now, anything that is freely licensed is indexed and searchable. They are working on getting access to some of the other licenses (Mozilla, Apache, etc) as well.
Even though Google has a similar search, they still rely on indexing and links. You can’t necessarily go on how many people are linking to a bit of code to find out how good it is. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And if I am looking for a class in .NET, then that’s what I want. Not an entire source code file that I have to go through line by line.
In the past month or so, I have raised the thought of specialized search being an area that needs to be concentrated on. Krugle gets it, receiving both Series A and Series B funding. Ixquick gets it. Apparently, Google is getting it by embracing some of the social bookmarking techniques.
Truly, only time will tell though. The fact remains though, that once some of these specialized search engines take shape, the web will be a very efficient place!