  Traditional web search forces the developers to leave their working
environments and look for solutions in the web browsers. It often does not
consider the context of their programming problems. The context-switching
between the web browser and the working environment is time-consuming and
distracting, and the keyword-based traditional search often does not help much
in problem solving. In this paper, we propose an Eclipse IDE-based web search
solution that collects the data from three web search APIs-- Google, Yahoo,
Bing and a programming Q & A site-- Stack Overflow. It then provides search
results within IDE taking not only the content of the selected error into
account but also the problem context, popularity and search engine
recommendation of the result links. Experiments with 25 run time errors and
exceptions show that the proposed approach outperforms the keyword-based search
approaches with a recommendation accuracy of 96%. We also validate the results
with a user study involving five prospective participants where we get a result
agreement of 64.28%. While the preliminary results are promising, the approach
needs to be further validated with more errors and exceptions followed by a
user study with more participants to establish itself as a complete IDE-based
web search solution.
