Patent ID: 7631294

Claim:
A computer implemented method, comprising: running a background component to continuously monitor a source code editor running in the computer; detecting a new source code or source code change entered within the source code editor using the background component; capturing the new source code or source code change at a time the new source code is entered within the source code editor; extracting the new code or code change and parsing the new code to extract related defining or structural elements of the source code; automatically constructing a search criterion based on the new source code and its defining elements detected by parsing the new source code entered within the source code editor; issuing a search request to a search engine including passing the automatically constructed search criterion as parameters to find source code that has the same or similar defining elements as the new source code or changed source code which the search criterion was constructed from; conducting a search based on the constructed search criterion, including conducting the search on source code indexed prior to conducting the search so that the conducted search is conducted more rapidly than without the indexing, the source code indexing including recording prior searches and search results and indexing such prior searches and search results in order to improve the quality and display order ranking of future search results; receiving a search result in response to the search conducted based on the search criterion; presenting the search result in a search result window associated with the source code editor; and providing an interface configured so that a user can copy and paste or otherwise integrate the search results from the search result window into a source code for the purpose of source code reuse and to avoid rewriting preexisting source code.