Why Krugle Is Better Than Google Code Search

By Amit Chowdhry ● Dec 3, 2006

As an experienced programmer, I can tell you that sometimes you do not have the time or the money to look into C++, PHP, or HTML books to solve some of your simple and/or complex programming questions.

Therefore, programmers tend to turn to the Internet for help. When I was growing up and even now, HTMLGoodies.com has provided a lot of insight for me when I developed websites, but with technology upgrading at a rapid pace and programming languages becoming obsolete, there has been a lack of online programming guide resources to meet these changes. Hence the creation of Google Code Search. However, Google Code Search has many limitations so I would recommend Krugle for your programming guide needs.

According to ZDNet, Ken Krugle created Krugle.com and the purpose of the site is to seek code by searching for project examples, tech pages, or code snippets and not just by the keywords. In terms of competition, “Google is like Microsoft was in the 1980s. It’s the name everyone thinks of before starting anything. But if you let yourself be paralyzed by the fact Google might do what you want to do, you will never do anything,” stated Ken Krugle.

[Edit: On the original date that I posted this article, I posted the above screenshot, but a gentleman associated with Krugle informed me that I had a couple of errors with the post. I was, in fact, looking at the Google Code Search Network instead of the Google Code Search page as displayed below. I apologize for the false information and will be more careful with my posts.]

Krugle provides the advantage of filtering programming language results which makes search on that website efficient. Krugle allows users to specifically search for code within comments, source code, function definitions, function calls, and class definitions. Krugle indexes over 20 million code files from 500 various public source code websites.

Around late October/early November, Krugle released CodeSpaces, which allowed with developers to share the results with other users. In an interview conducted by Frank Sommers, Ken Krugle stated the following in terms of the role of search in the software development process:

“For many developers, the most powerful development tool is search. Yet, if you ask developers [what they consider their most powerful development tool], some would say Eclipse, Visual Studio, GCC, or vi. None of them would mention search. People talk about programming methodologies, extreme programming, or test-driven development, but I haven’t seen anything about the role search plays in being a good software developer…”