Find code. Find answers.

Every Wednesday on AltSearchEngines, we take a tour of a different search engine’s headquarters.  Today we paid a visit to Code Search engine Krugle.  Our guide was Laura Merling, VP Marketing and Business Development.

Krugle’s mission is to leverage search to make development resources easily accessible and instantly valuable no matter where they live. This means providing a deep, rich, contextual search. We have a three pronged approach based on where developers live and play.

Our public site has the largest collection of public code with over 2.6 billion lines of code – ranges from code from Sourceforge to Microsoft’s Codeplex.  And next week, we will officially be the first to include IBM’s code into our index. Developers can search for code and related information such as tech pages and projects that are available in the public domain.

We also offer Krugle for Developer Networks, enabling developers to better find and leverage code for the platforms they specifically use. Technology companies who have developer networks, want developer to be successful using their tools and api’s and provide 100’s to thousands of code samples.  Krugle is the leading provider of code search on developer networks the second most common place developers look for code.  We provide code search for Yahoo! Developer Network, CollabNet, and SourceForge. We will be launching two more developer networks in October – one is considered the largest developer network for enterprise developers!

This leads me to the third and most valuable prong of our approach to making life easier for developers.  Krugle released Krugle Enterprise and has 16 large enterprises as users.  The companies range from 100 total developers to 20,000 developers.  The great part is that we have not needed to talk to a CIO yet! The developers, and more specifically the architects and dev managers are leading the charge.  They have created use cases and proposals and all we had to do was ship an appliance. The interesting part is the decision maker and buyer is the architect! Why is this?  Individual developers get basic desktop and project level search from their existing dev tools – they don’t need another tool..  What Krugle brings to the table that is unique is visibility across projects, across the company.  The value – they can now determine impact analysis on not just their own code, but they can see the impact across the organization. They can leverage code that is not on their desktop – they can find things that others have created – raising the opportunity to bring reuse to reality.

We also are unique in the fact that we do more than code search.  We believe that code alone is not enough.  We have created an external data framework that allows enterprises to integrate information that supports or supplements the code such as SCM check-in comments and bug tracking databases. 

And finally, with the appliance model, in most cases our customers have been up and running in two hours or less!  This makes for a very positive user experience from the first interaction with Krugle. The reality is that developers are changing how software cracks the enterprise.  The other reality is that we’ve become one of the most important tools on their desktop.  Nobody has racked up the partnerships or customers we have.

Search has evolved from searching for code to finding code. It’s no longer sufficient to just offer a service that helps developers search for code.  What developers need is a way to find code, to interact with it, to use it.  As such, developers — and the enterprises they belong to — are aligning with partners that have the relationships and repositories they need.  Increasingly, those decisions are falling our way.

If you have a question or comment for Laura, please post it here.

If you’d like to have us stop by to see your search engine, please send an email to Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com.