"SourceForge is the place to go," said Jeff Wartes, a software engineer for Seattle-based Whitepages.com Inc. But Wartes said he is "intrigued" by Google's offering, noting that SourceForge's search function is "not that great" and the site has sometimes been slow to add the latest features desired by developers.

Jay Seirmarco, SourceForge.net's general manager, said the site is in the midst of a long-term upgrade that will fix many of the issues users have complained about. He also welcomed Google's move.

"What's good for the open-source community is good for SourceForge," he said.

To underline that, Google's Stein said the two firms are working together to create a common database of open-source project names, to avoid duplication and confusion.

To help developers more efficiently search for worthwhile projects, Google will use its search algorithms to rank projects by the number of participants and the amount of recent activity. Idle projects will be slowly culled from Google's main database. Fake projects put up, according to Stein, by those looking for a "free place to store their MP3s" or hackers looking to gather user passwords will be filtered and shut down.