A startup claims to have come up with a better way for developers to find source code. Traditionally, developers use the regular search engines, such as Google, Bing, but those are unfriendly to searching source code.

If you are a web developer or programmer who often needs to shuffle between writing code in multiple languages, check out NerdyData, a new startup search engine for all programming related documentation including HTML, JavaScript, and Source Code.

Google’s search engine is geared mostly towards providing answers to a specific query asked by the user, whereas NerdyData is developed to give the best list of results for a query. Developed by Steven Sonnes and David Bielik, the NerdyData team have visited over 140 million homepages and collected terabytes of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code. The result is displaying of several search interfaces to query against the source code of webpages.

How it works?

Developers are not simply code writers. They must also draw from software libraries, license information, project documentation, and so forth on a regular basis. NerdyData claims that its search engine can deliver the precise details developers need to solve their immediate problems.

You type a query; NerdyData will make sure that you will find accurate results for your queries, without having to redefine your search. NerdyData uses complex algorithm to fetch exact search data for you.

“For most terms, we will do an exact match search and return results that match pages where the term is exactly the same as what was entered into the search box.  A search for “Michael Jordan” would find pages where the words “Michael” and “Jordan” appear next to each other on the page, and not pages that only happen to contain the words “Michael” and “Jordan” on them individually. For searches with many distinct words, we may also return results that contain partial matches, along with exact match results,” notes the NerdyData help documentation.

Alternately, you may filter your search query on two different types of sorting: Popularity and Relevance. Popularity query would return results in descending order based on traffic received, whereas Relevance search result would show most relevant information for the query entered. Relevance search uses a number of functions to do a search including the inverse document frequency, rarity of the term and the number of times the terms appear on the page.

After you perform the search, you can download the results in four different formats including JSON, CSV, XML, and Plain Text.

In addition to regular source code search, developers can now find all sites owned by the same Google Analytics account as well as can search meta text, Comparative Search and Backlink and Image search. The Backlink and Image search interfaces are similar, and allow developers to query by entering a URL, or a part of a URL, to find what pages that URL appears on.

“With Backlink Search you can find all sites that link to a specific web page, and get the title and description of each result.  This is useful for SEO purposes, as search engines like Google and Bing use the links that point to a web page in their ranking algorithms,” noted the search engine documentation.

Pricing

To perform a search, developers need to have credits to afford the cost of that query. Source code search queries in NerdyData cost 3 credits per search, Comparative Search cost two credits, SEO Search, Backlink Search and Image Search each cost one credit.

By default, demo accounts are given 10 credits and are limited to making queries on the Source Code Search interface only. If developers need more search information, they have to buy a basic (costing $19/month), professional (costing $99/month) or enterprise (costing $149/month) plan.

However, if you are looking to search to debug problems in your existing code or to search for code snippets, Google’s Code Search is best place for you.

Developers can try a free demo here and more information on pricing and help documentation can be found here and here.