Koders: Another search mini-app

It looks like search is starting to gain momentum, both desktop and service based. In the last couple of weeks, we had:

Desktop Search

• Google Desktop
  
• renewed interest in Lookout (Lucene .Net based)
  
• nascent Lucene Desktop is generating a lot of interest, though it is hard to say how it will deferentiate itself from Zilverline
  
• And many more. See comparison on FileHand's pages
  

Web based search miniapps

• JarHoo will help you to locate a Jar where a class is defined
  
• Koders will allow you to find which open source project contains code you may need and will show some interesting stats about it (e.g. Projected reimplementation time). It may or may not be based on Lucene for the search component.
  I have to say though that I did not feel as a target audience for Koders. I wanted to get in, type the class name , find the useful project that had it and go to that project's home. I could do all, but the last one. Instead, when I clicked on the project's name, I got drawn deeper into the Koders site and was offered to look at statistics and source code. Oh well, Google is always a click away.
  

I think in the future we will see yet more of search miniapps, possibly very specialized. I can think of several that would be useful for my BEA support work.

Just as an example, I would like a small application that would index all descriptors for both standard and Vendor specific deployment descriptors and then would allow me to search by name substring. That way, I could search for timeout and get a general overview of what timeouts are configurable, in which file and exactly where in deployment descriptor's hierarchy.

Any takers?

The biggest problem of course is who will pay for traffic. JarHoo was running google ads, but it still needed to be sponsored by a hosting company. Such good will may not last long.

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