When you search SourcePop, you are searching source code, but at the same time you're searching the text of articles and blogs that support that code. SourcePop essentially creates an infinite snippet library based on the input of thousands of bloggers, web pages, articles and tutorials and lets you access that snippet library in any way you like. You just enter a query into the system as you would any other search engine and the most relevant code or code related article will be surfaced to you. The code you receive is automatically extracted, cross referenced against the context of the article and evaluated for correctness!
More then that, SourcePop let's you search with plain English queries, which is amazing if you are a programmer in a situation where you don't know how to do something. The natural language processing in SourcePop relates the context of the article to the code in question and gets the best sample for the query or task at hand.
For example, when I conceived of SourcePop I was primarily a C# developer, and I found myself in a position where I had to pick up C and Java in hurry. I had a lot of code to write but because of my inexperience with these new languages, I found myself floundering when it came to writing tasks I knew I could handle very easily in C#. I simply wasn't familiar enough with the syntax to get through common tasks quickly.
I tried using the other available code searches like Koders, Google and Krugel. Each of them had their inherit benefits, but none of them were a real help when it came to real world searches like: "iterate through a collection", "make an http request", "connect to a mysql database" or "call a yahoo search api". If you try these on other engines and you'll end up with basic keyword hits on source docs, which is of course of little use in this situation. I ideally wanted something like an online snippet library, but one where the subject matter was unlimited. Most online libraries had a few links relating to what I needed, but if I needed something very specific or more sophisticated, I was stuck sifting through documents on my own using normal web search engines.
At some point I decided to build SourcePop and put it online so other developers with the same troubles could quickly and easily find what they were looking for. If you try any of the searches above on SourcePop, and you'll quickly find the code you need and can just copy and paste it into your program. Not only that, but you can rest assured the code you find is correct. Because SourcePop's code repository spans the entire net, it's able to compare and contrast various usages to make sure that's what is being presented to you is the best possible result.
But don't believe me. See for yourself:
Iterate through a collection with Java
Connect to Mysql with C#
Read text from a file with Java
Encrypt a string with RSA using C#
Create an MD5 hash with Java
Make an HTTP request with C
Use a BinaryReader in VB.NET
Use an HttpWebRequest in C#
Dial a phone with C
Calculate the tangent of an angle with Java
Send an email with VB.NET
Make an asynchronous method call in Java
Indexing Text with Java
Using the Lucene IndexWriter with Java
AES Encryption with C++