Krugle unveils a search engine for code

I’m just back from the Demo 2006 conference in Phoenix. Demo, for those who don’t know, is a show owned by InfoWorld parent company IDG, and it gives tech startups six minutes to present their technology to an audience of corporate investors and venture capitalists. Of the 68 startups that took the stage this year, two really stood out.

The first, Krugle , demonstrated a search engine that finds code for reuse. Its unofficial tagline is “the Google for programming code.” The benefit of Krugle’s search engine is obvious to any developer who has looked to the open source community to find some nifty utility, rather than starting from scratch.

Steve Larsen, Krugle’s founder and CEO, walked me through a demo. The site has two search bars: Find Content, and the other, Find Code. Pretending we wanted to extend our Web site to China, we typed in “internationalization template Java” and clicked on the Find Content bar.

Krugle returned numerous results, including one from IBM marked “International Components for Unicode” that looked particularly helpful. When we clicked on that result, we were taken to a description of the IBM project that included sample code.

Then we took a keyword from the code (“StringTemplateGroup”), plugged it into the search bar, and this time hit Find Code. Krugle returned hits from myriad projects. Clicking on a result allowed us to view the code, colorized to indicate the different “parts of speech” in the program, which makes it very easy to read.

Along the side were listed all the other files that were part of the project, such as the license file (this particular project used a BSD open source license), the documentation file, and a description of the project. Larsen says the deep technology information included in these related files, along with the source code, is the real value of Krugle.

Although the Krugle search engine will be publicly available — how could an open source search tool be anything but? — the company does want to make money. Larsen projects two possible revenue streams. One is to simply follow the Google model and charge for advertising.

The second is more interesting: licensing the Krugle software to companies that want to put it behind their own firewall. Larsen cites an IBMer he spoke with who said that his own group wrote 11 different registration programs in one year. That’s the kind of thing using Krugle might prevent by encouraging better code reuse.

The other presenter that caught my attention was a company called LogLogic. Its latest version tracks, monitors, and analyzes every bit of log data generated by any system on the network. The company’s newest application, LogLogic Compliance Suite, can verify that a company is following recommended Sarbanes-Oxley procedures, such as COBIT 4.0.

Let’s say Sarbanes-Oxley requires that any terminated employee be expunged from company systems within 24 hours. LogLogic tracks the HR systems used to eliminate the employee and reports on when it was done and by whom.

All in all, the investors attending this year’s Demo saw another promising crop of startups. But a conversation overheard at the show revealed famous last words. One young attendee to another: “They’re not going to buy the company to just shut it down.”

Wanna bet?