Quick question: what's the most commonly used developer tool? According to Krugle CTO Ken Krugler, the answer is search. As developer and Krugle fan Justin Royce puts it:
Coders are notoriously lazy - seriously. We'd rather find someone who's developed something similar, copy it, then hack it up to do what we want... We typically think up a few lines of code, then look at the news and then go back to coding a few more lines. If we need a big block of code like a function, we'd rather go searching, sometimes for hours, for someone that's already done it for us.
The problem is, traditional search engines aren't optimized for finding code, which is why Krugler launched Krugle earlier this year. I first read about the company on GigaOm. Then I came across Justin's detailed review. According to Technorati there are 2,492 other blog posts on Krugle's code-oriented search engine. It's got fans, not to mention 20 million source files, or 1 billion lines of code.
I spent some time looking around Krugle's website, and I like the company's idea of "open source + component software + globalization" being key drivers of software development. Unfortunately I have no programming skills and can't understand the search results. Your customers, on the other hand, might be a different story.
Many hosting companies say their target market is developers. If this describes you, might it make sense to partner with Krugle and offer co-branded code search within your customer interface? It'd increase the amount of time customers spend on your website. Krugle might even be able to offer aggregated stats on what development tools seem to be popular among your user base.
(I don't know the folks at Krugle, but since it's an ad supported service, I'm guessing they'd welcome search traffic from your customers.)
During ISPCON, Jon Price talked about how companies who serve similar audiences ought to find ways to work together. You and Krugle; that combination just might have some potential...
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