Gossip site Valleywag has reported the pending launch of Google Code Search. The site received news of the announcement, which is embargoed until 9 PM PDT today.

“According to a journalist, Google’s new product will launch already larger than the two main source code search engines, Koders and Krugle,” said Valleywag.

Google first debuted its competitor to SourceForge in July. Called Project Hosting, Google claimed it was not competing with SourceForge and pledged not to permit the creation of namespaces that duplicated projects on SourceForge.

The code repository at Project Hosting quickly began to fill with new contributions. Languages like Perl and others have a variety of projects appearing in Google’s repository.

It was noted in July that Google’s full-text search and version control for Project Hosting would draw upon Google’s existing technologies for search and storage. Code Search will be a logical extension of their services to developers.

Update: Google did launch the new service, and we have added the link to the first paragraph.

—

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

From //engtech. Author unknown, he keeps his name off the blog for fear of hurting his career. Bummer, this blog is very good. I’d hire whoever did it.

To everyone who has been emailing me stuff for the blog. I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. I’m WAY overloaded on email. I’ll try to catch up while other people are driving the van today. But, I won’t be answering email until next Saturday.

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

A decade ago, the disclosure that Microsoft was preparing to enter a technology market would begin stirring fear in that marketplace. Existing vendors heard their beating hearts being slowly silenced by Microsoft.

Google could be ready to take that mantle from Microsoft. It appears The Fear has slipped into the corporate apparatus at SourceForge, as the company sent along a belated press release to our inbox about their recent site updates.

Friday readers will recall that Google launched Project Hosting, a pared down version of SourceForge, essentially. As we noted here:

SourceForge’s structure has its fans and its detractors. To win over the latter and keep the former, SourceForge’s masters at OSTG have proceeded to make several changes to the site.

They listed the search redesign at the top of the list. “By implementing enhanced sorting and filtering options, and introducing new advanced project and tool searches, visitors can quickly drill in to the site’s vast content,” they noted in an email.

“SourceForge.net now offers the community robust and powerful search capabilities and a better way to browse our content. Judging from the increased usage of these offerings, the community is embracing these tools to find best-of-breed Open Source solutions,” said Jay Seirmarco, general manager of SourceForge.net.

Google made Subversion its version control mechanism of choice at the outset. SourceForge added Subversion in February, in addition to the older CVS it has had in place for some time.

SourceForge also tweaked Subversion so projects could be linked to external Subversion repositories. They plan to extend that new linking capability so projects can offer users access to other services or tools, like developer blogs and documentation wikis.

More improvements to SourceForge are at hand, as the site plans to build on its lengthy reputation and hosting of more than 125,000 projects. They want the next 125,000 projects to come there too, and not head over to Google Code’s alternative.

—
Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The Project Hosting section of Google Code debuted yesterday during Greg Stein’s talk at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. Stein works for Google as an open source engineer, and is known for his role as chairman of the Apache Software Foundation.

Before the announcement, NewsForge’s Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier and Stein talked about Project Hosting. Stein said in the report that Google just wanted to see what they can do with their infrastructure to provide an alternative service for hosting open source projects.

Google is taking care not to overtly stomp on SourceForge with Project Hosting, which will not have some features that are present at SourceForge and similar sites.

That’s a careful statement, in that Google doesn’t say whether or not it finds those particular features desirable. Stein goes on to tell Brockmeier that Google was able to “cut out a lot of heavy structure” in creating Project Hosting.

Google will disallow attempts to duplicate namespaces that already exist on SourceForge. This will prevent someone from placing code on Project Hosting and naming it after an established project on SourceForge.

Project Hosting has a couple of main features. One is the full-text search across projects using Google’s vaunted technology in that area. The other is version control. Google rebuilt the open source Subversion project to work with Google’s storage technology, called BigTable.

Stein also said Project Hosting will not include website hosting for projects, as SourceForge does. That doesn’t mean Google couldn’t suggest its Base or Pages services as options for developers. Not to mention Gmail and the newly updated Google Talk for communication, or Google Groups for discussions about a project.

ZDNet’s Google blogger Garett Rogers had guessed Stein would announce a SourceForge-like service with Subversion during his talk. He noted that while code search, as opposed to project search, isn’t available yet, it should be something Google unveils soon.

Discuss this article with your fellow WebPros at WebProWorld.
—

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

While the vast majority of the attention paid to search engines will focus on the Internet at the Search Engine Strategies conference, IBM plans to bring forth search technology that will let enterprise users find information based on ideas instead of keywords.

According to Reuters, IBM’s Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) can analyze text within documents and other media to understand latent meanings, relationships and facts. IBM will make UIMA available to software developers.

Factiva and several other companies will utilize UIMA to develop software products that can do text analysis and search. IBM also offers its WebSphere OmniFind product, which focuses on searching through all kinds of unstructured data, like email, images, and audio files.

Contextual search goes beyond the typical querying Internet users do on search engines. Products based on UIMA will attempt to find documents and files based not just on what users query, but what they might mean with that query. “I don’t see any of the major players moving into this area,” Arthur Ciccolo, head of search technology at IBM Research, said in the article.

In making the UIMA project freely available, IBM plans to start a project on SourceForge by the end of this year. Interested parties can obtain the framework from IBM’s AlphaWorks web site.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.