Edit:
Since theres been some confusion with dates
In 2016 github made site side searching login only and hid the search bar if you werent logged in. This didnt include searching within a repository so that could still be done, just not all repositories
This year was the change being referred to in this link which made repository level searching require logging in
Blog post: https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/
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.
must have been a half ass attempt
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.
Do you expect something as basic as a search to put up a fight?
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.
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.
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.
It used to be pretty bad but they worked on it and made it a lot better over time.
