Google offers Code Search. Are Koders and Krugle feeling lucky?

In journalism we say "three examples makes a trend". In business school they teach that three competitors make a market category. Both tropes now apply to code search, since Google has jumped into a market pioneered by Koders.com three years ago, and expanded by Krugle.com in the middle of last year.

I asked Chris DiBona, Google's top open source guru, about differentiation. He replied, "We are move comprehensive by an order of magnitude and I think we give a faster, smarter experience. Our dupe-detection is really cool, you can almost instantly see which routine is more popular/used in the world (search for btree or some other common algorithm)".

Koders and Krugle are hardly standing still, of course. And they can now press their advantages around the edges of a large market presence. For Koders those include algorithms optimized for code searching and results ranking, search filters, an API so other services can access the search index, and an Enterprise Edition that searches behind company firewalls. For Krugle those include iterative searching, search of related non-code documentation, ties of meta-data to code, and a notes function for comments on (and linkage to) code.

Those, of course, are subsets of current offerings by all three services, which are sure to evolve and change even more as competition heats up and programmers get more involved.

- Doc Searls