A Search Engine for Open-Source Code

Krugle aspires to be the Google of software code search, even referring to itself as a verb. And recently, Krugle has started to become the go-to search site for open-source developers, partnering with key websites, including SourceForge.net, the leading repository for open-source software projects, to embed Krugle search. Krugle also announced a similar partnership with CollabNet, a community of 1 million developers.

Cofounder and CTO Ken Krugler says Krugle soothes a pain point for developers: They spend 25 percent or more of their time searching for lines of code to perform certain functions that may already exist. There’s no sense in writing code that’s already been written, says Krugler.

How does Krugle simplify code search on SourceForge? Developers typically visit SourceForge to find a project similar to the one they’re doing. But they end up having to download the whole project. Krugle lets them search through the project to see if it fits the bill without downloading it entirely.

Krugle gives software developers one thing they need most, time, says John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data, a research firm.

“If you could shave 10 percent of that [search] time off, that is a huge productivity improvement either in costs savings, revenue generation or just spare time,” Andrews says.

Google is still the first stop for many open-source developers, but as the volume of open-source code grows, as companies use more open source for development internally, and as more software companies open their previously proprietary code, Google may not be able to keep up, says Andrews.

Krugle’s next venture will be search for open-source development within enterprises: An enterprise product currently in beta is slated for general release in the second half of 2007.