Yahoo Developer Network Adds Krugle Code Search
The Yahoo Developer Network has partnered with the code search engine Krugle to add a nice code searching interface to the Developer Network website. Wired has previously covered Krugle about this time last year when it launched and, for my money, it’s still the best code search engine out there.
The new search engine on the Yahoo Developer Network website integrates all the features of Krugle, and in fact, from the looks of it, Yahoo pretty much just added their logo — otherwise the layout and design of the site is nearly identical to Krugle.
The really nice thing about Krugle is that, unlike many code search engines, you can search code, tech pages or projects. Even better, within a code-based search, you can specify that the search terms should appear in comments, code, function call, function definition, class definition or all of the above. This kind of fine-grained filtering makes it much easier to find exactly what you want.
The results on Yahoo’s new Krugle integrated search match those of the main Krugle site (see example screenshot below) and the search is lightening fast. Apparently Yahoo Developer Network launched before the Krugle folks had time to index Yahoo’s own documentation and code, but that oversight is expected to be fixed soon. If you have other suggestions or features you’d like to see, Yahoo is soliciting feedback.
I find it interesting that code search is such a hot vertical market — it seems that every week there’s a new code search engine popping up. We recently looked at AllTheCode and I found this post on the Krugle blog that lists fifteen other code search engines.
As a some time developer myself it’s nice to have so many options but I can’t help wishing a Krugle for blog searches would pop up, neither Technorati nor Google Blog Search have ever impressed me.
I’d hardly be called original for suggesting that vertical searches are the future of the internet, but it’s offerings like Krugle that remind you why everyone touts vertical search engines. I have no doubt that a generalized Google search will always be useful for some, but increasingly, to really find quality results, you need to narrow your searching pool. Searching a subset of the web — Code, Blogs, News, Medical, etc — is in the end perhaps the only way to make sense of it.
