The challenge of finding technical information

By Ken Krugler, CTO, John D. Mitchell, Chief Architect, LinuxWorld.com, 01/29/07

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Finding all of the code and technical information that exists is actually a bit more difficult than one might think at first glance. Even in the world of the text-based, general purpose search engines there is a lot of content that is hard to get at because it is locked up behind various kinds of barriers. The poster child being newspapers that lock up their content behind registration gates. This has been called the "dark Web".

Similarly, in a vision of programmer utopia all code would be open-sourced but, alas, the reality is that there are three basic levels of access: public, gated and private.

Public access is the open Web. No registration systems or anything else getting in the way of accessing code and related information.

Gated communities include most of the developer programs and lots of sites that just want to have some idea of who is looking at their stuff. That is, the information is basically open-sourced in one form or another but the access to it is gated. A number of companies do this so that they can require the user to accept their license agreement before being granted access.

Private access includes the vast majority of internally developed information. This category also includes a number of non-open-source, commercial providers such as the so-called "developer source" programs.

The general purpose search engines can mostly ignore the dark Web because there's plenty of content in the public Web to satisfy the vast majority of users' desires. However, the world of search-driven development has much deeper needs. Any given professional developer will often need to search across multiple areas to get all of the information that they need to solve their problem. For example, a developer at a large company may have access to multiple internal projects, multiple private developer-sourced libraries licensed from commercial vendors, be a member of many developer programs, and be using numerous open-source packages. That makes comprehensive deep search capabilities a requirement to really fulfill the promise of search-driven development.

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