this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Programming
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The biggest news to me is that GitHub allows users to search code. Every single time I tried to search something in GitHub, search results were next to completely useless, and always a sure-fire waste of time and effort.
There's hope, I guess.
lol? That must have been a half ass attempt on your part because GitHub search is fantastic.
How hard do you need to try to use a feature for it to be considered decent? Do you expect something as basic as a search to put up a fight?
Can you elaborate on what happened when you tried to search? I’ve never had trouble.
GitHub search simply won't find search terms that I know are there (because I can grep them in my local repo). It also fails to search all branches. There's also insufficient filtering for filetypes or paths.
Maybe I'm just spoiled from having used OpenGrok, as well as knowing how to use basic tools like find and grep, all of which I find substantially more useful.
Increasingly, you should be. Search algorithms from Amazon to Google are getting deliberately enshittified in order to force you to see what they want you to see instead of finding what you were actually looking for. For example, things like quotation marks and the minus operator no longer work. I would be supremely unsurprised to learn of Microsoft following suit.
Agreed their search is legendary
Just use the search bar... the only one they have that is on every page at the top right. That takes you to the results which defaults to code, but you can change it on the side to show repos, issues, prs, etc. You can even limit it to single repos or whole organisations.
You used the wrong search bar, you just used the one for the file list.
There is a search icon on the top right.
The fact that one of the excuses for GitHub search results being subpar is that there is a right and a wrong search bar is already telling.
The fact you call it "search results being subpar" tell me you never used the big top search bar labeled "Type
/to search".You can't make an interface that everyone will understand, there will always be a percentage of user who will be lost.
This is news to me. I've been cloning and searching for years because web search was useless. And by useless I mean - I know the word I'm looking for appears in exactly four places, formatted and capitalized exactly this way - and GitHub web search still doesn't find it.
It wouldn't surprise me if it's gotten massively better - but only in the way that choosing to ride a bicycle to work is a massive improvement over sitting on a random rock.
It used to be pretty bad but they worked on it and made it a lot better over time.
It still sucks
I don't find the search too bad but what does make it difficult is digging through a million forks of a library. Sometimes I want to find how other people used an obscure library method and I end up having to wade through endless forks with the same repeated bit of code.
This is more a complaint of people using forking as a like button but I do wish there was an option to exclude them from search.
GitHub search is almost as bad as Atlassian search