Review: Specialized search engines fit the niche
For when the Google net spreads too wide
By Peter Smith
Computerworld |
One of the most obvious competitors to BiggerBoat's movie search is IMDB.com (IMDB stands for Internet Movie Database). It has community features that BiggerBoat lacks, but in all other ways BiggerBoat seems like the superior movie search tool. IMDB has a very flat search scheme, while BiggerBoat makes it easy to -- for example -- get a list of all the Johnny Depp movies that Tim Burton has directed. Additionally the filters make it easy to rediscover forgotten titles of movies, as long as you know a person (actor, director, producer, etc) associated with it.
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| BiggerBoat offers compound searches. In this case, a search for Johnny Depp and Director = Tim Burton. (Click image to see larger view.) |
Finding a niche: Krugle's search engine for developers
Krugle is a search engine for programmers and Web developers. The Krugle search engine spiders code repositories, archives and online documents looking for software projects and source code. The main search interface has three parts: Code, Tech Pages and Projects.
To search for code, you select a search phrase and optionally (and probably) choose a programming language, where the term is found (with options such as "comments," "source code," "function definitions" and so on) and even specify the project to find the term in. Results, all of which are source code, are displayed in a tab, with a panel on the right displaying Related Results, which might be Open Source Projects, Tech Terms and so on.
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| Krugle lets you read source code without leaving the current Web page. (Click image to see larger view.) |
Clicking on a Krugle search result opens the source in a new tab, at which point the right-hand panel is replaced with a view of the project that this file is a part of, showing where in the project tree it resides. You can browse the project and open any other files you need to check out. Each one opens in a new tab; in the meanwhile, your search results are still in their initial tab, so you can jump back to them at any time. You can even add a note to a file and make it either public (so other Krugle users will see it if they browse this source) or just for your own use.