Yesterday afternoon, I was lurking about the exhibition hall and stood in a bit for the code search demonstration that OReilly was giving. I immediately asked why they didn’t just use krugle, and they had a pretty good answer – they wanted a walled-garden search of the books – not just all open source projects. The theory presented was that the code examples in the books had some level of expectation of being better than your joe-random open source project.
They did a neat sort of concordance (only a real book geek could love that, even if it is useful…) in your standard “larger type == more popular” layout that has been so popular for tag sets.
Their code search was sort of brutally slow, and I didn’t feel like it had a very good index (the search term “python json” didn’t return anything), but the interface that was wrapped around it was very intriguing. They’ve got a lot of interface tweaks and friendliness wrapped in there that’s not obvious at first breath.
I rather hope we see the optimized version of this hitting the Safari book library before too long…
Rhonabwy 
Krugle is already plugged into OReilly’s code snippet search. Try it out. Any time you do a code search on Krugle, check the related results on the left of the main results. If there are matching hits found in code snippets in any of the books at OReilly, you’ll get Safari Related Results hits back.
Click on the link to view the code snippet from the book. If you want more, you can follow the link to Safari to view more. Of course, you’ll have to signup for Safari to view the book…and support Krugle in the process!
The searching is done by the Safari Books Online server and the results returned to Krugle for display, so the hits typically show up a second or two later than the Krugle results. But the search is reasonably fast. We think it’s really useful.
Of course, we’d be happy to crawl and index all of Safari’s published code directly so we can provide all the structured indexes we do for open source code, but OReilly’s keeping that for themselves for now – understandably.
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