Krugle, when Google is second best
8Jan2007
Krugle (pronounced ‘kroogle’) is a search engine for software developers that helps in finding source code among open source projects or public code in the web. It also allows to find particular projects or to search over technical documents.
Besides the common search engine capabilities, this web application presents a great usability as users can keep their search results and browse over other related searches without losing the results in a tabbed-IDE-style way (IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, a well known interface among their potential users). Furthermore, Krugle also offers capabilities to add comments to the code that users can share among the community in a web2.0-manner.
Launched in early 2006, Krugle has become an essential tool for developers and, despite its phonetic similarity with ‘Google’, they both have nothing to do with each other. Google, on their side, is developing a similar application that still stays as a ‘lab project‘. It is called Google Code Search.
Nevertheless, Google Code Search is far from being a real competitor for Krugle. It lacks many of Krugle’s functionality and only adds regular expression based search. But we all know what happens when Google is second best. Just remember YouTube. What comes next? Only time will tell.