Ask HN: How many of you would like a Google code crawler?

7 points by sshrin ↗ HN
I like to stay updated with what is happening in the webtoolkit & appengine communities and I sometimes browse code.google.com project hosting to see if there are any interesting projects.

It turns out there are many that are interesting and offer a) some immediate use in my current projects or b) a learning opportunity to see how something has been implemented.

The problem is that the search on code.google.com sucks and there is no way to filter by date / activity / lastUpdatedDate etc.

So, the only way you are going to discover new projects is by clicking through every single page until you find something interesting and very few have time for that.

I am thinking it might be an interesting project to write a crawler that would periodically crawl the site and publish notifications about new projects to subscribers who can opt-in to notifications about a particular label (gwt/jquery/appengine etc.).

Would you find this useful? Are there other ways of doing this today?

3 comments

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If you just want to target code.google.com, they already offer Atom feeds of project issues.
Yes, I'm aware of that. However, you're talking about staying up-to-date with some project whereas I was referring to getting to know about new projects in your area of interest.
Ok. But why restrict only to code.google.com? why not track other project hosts as well?