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Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Google Code Search
Google made a nice splash last week by announcing Google Code Search, which allows searching
public source code. Cool.
Google is big and powerful, so everything they do gets lots
of press. But to be fair, it should be noted that Google wasn't first in this
market. Several other players were up and running before Google's offering:
In fact, from my own highly biased perspective, none
of the above was first to market. As far as I know, the first source code
search engine was CodeCatalog.
Sadly, if you just clicked on the link to visit
CodeCatalog.com, you found a squatter page. CodeCatalog is now gone. In fact,
its life was rather short, but it predated all the current players by five
years or so.
 CodeCatalog was a pet project of mine back in late 1999
and early 2000. I got rather obsessed with the idea of source code search
engine. I'm sure I was supposed to be acting more like a CEO of SourceGear,
but instead I was hacking on parsers and indexers. CodeCatalog was like my
personal skunk works project. I designed and wrote the code. I coordinated
the marketing splash. I was the sales guy who closed the deal. The whole
thing was a reckless risk, but it turned out very well for SourceGear.
The front end for CodeCatalog was built with Zope. IIRC, the backend was written in Java.
Performance issues were tricky, and I was only indexing
around 20 million lines of code. The current players are handling ten times
that amount or more. Nonetheless, most of my development time was spent making
sure that searches were blazingly fast.
I never really intended to run a source code search engine
as a business. My goal was to unveil CodeCatalog with a gaudy launch at
LinuxWorld Expo in February 2000 at the Javits convention center in New York. All the big Linux and Open Source players would be there. We would draw lots of
attention to CodeCatalog and then sell it to somebody like SourceForge for big
bucks.
 We decided to build the brand identity for CodeCatalog
around a cartoon mascot. We hired a cartoonist to draw a robotic dog. We
named him Cody.
At LinuxWorld, Cody was everywhere. We did big splashy
booth graphics and printed thousands of T-shirts.
And we even brought Cody himself. Sort of. The role of
Cody was played by a Sony Aibo. We gave the dog away as a raffle prize one the
last day of the show. Back then, Aibos were relatively new and difficult to
find. I had to buy one on eBay.
As it turns out, things worked out very much like we
planned, but not exactly.
Some time before LinuxWorld Expo, we crossed paths with a
company called OpenAvenue. Long story short, we closed a deal to sell CodeCatalog
to OpenAvenue just before the LinuxWorld show. I should not disclose the sale
price, but I will say that it was a big enough bag of cash that we have no
regrets.
Unfortunately, OpenAvenue languished. Their business was
very roughly in the same space as SourceForge and CollabNet, but they just
didn't get enough traction. Ultimately, OpenAvenue went out of business and
took CodeCatalog down with them.
Fortunately for us, OpenAvenue met their financial
obligations to SourceGear even as their own company was going through a very
difficult financial struggle. I was very grateful to their CEO Paul Hessinger
for that.
Paul and I have not kept in touch, but I just did a Google
search and discovered that he is currently CEO of InRule (they sell a rule engine for .NET).
Their management team page also lists Kate McGowan, who I remember as the
primary marketing person for OpenAvenue.
A search of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine shows that
the earliest archived copy of the CodeCatalog website is from May
2000. The last version was from March
2001.
If Cody were still alive today, he would be almost six years
old. If the technology and website were actively maintained and improved
throughout that time period, CodeCatalog would probably be quite impressive.
I'm happy with the deal, but I do regret that Cody never reached his potential.
But business realities are what they are, and CodeCatalog is
long forgotten by almost everyone.
Except me. I still have several of the T-shirts, and I
sometimes wear one when I'm just hanging around at home. I guess it's my way
of keeping Cody's memory alive. :-)
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