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Search friendliness. Quite a few open-source projects rely heavily on being findable, and often use their Github README as a sort of "marketing site" for devel

Search friendliness. Quite a few open-source projects rely heavily on being findable, and often use their Github README as a sort of "marketing site" for developers. Finding projects organically on Gitlab is a nightmare.

tikkabhuna 7y ago
Search in general in Gitlab is painful. Searches seem to require 3 or more characters, but if you put two you just don't see any results. No warning saying add more. Pretty intuitive. The file name search is pretty rapid though.
- toupeira 7y ago
  We have an ongoing project to enable Elasticsearch on gitlab.com, which will greatly improve this: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/153 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/153 There's also a dedicated Search team being built at the moment to focus just on this.
  - tikkabhuna 7y ago
    That's good to know, thanks! Gitlab is one of the few products where I look forward to each release. You guys are doing a great job at keeping interest high and your communication is great.
- lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  Github search is not much better. I've resorted to using google search and append site:github.com to my query.
ndarwincorn 7y ago
When was the last time you found a project organically on GitHub?
- lucideer 7y ago
  Well, organically is a vague term. My usage of it was: go to GitLab/Hub and type into global site search box to find a project. This seemingly simple action does not work on Gitlab. To answer your question, I do the above often on Github. Probably found projects that way as recently as last week.
  - ndarwincorn 7y ago
    Interesting. Site-wide search in both cases has almost always been next-to-useless for me.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Not sure what counts as organic, but if I find a project that impresses me on github I often click through to their repos and scroll through to look for other gems. I found bottle.js that way a week ago. I also cross reference people from Twitter if they seem smart. And I click back and forth between NPM pages and GitHub pages to see people’s work. Some of that is pretty doable if they switched to Gitlab... except the Twitter cross reference, just because I would have to remember to search both gitlab and GitHub.
_coveredInBees 7y ago
A related note is that Github repos have much better SEO than gitlab repos. It is probably a combination of Github being weighted more heavily by search algorithms, but also because Github has a far better network effect. I've tried searching for a repo that is hosted on Gitlab, that is an extremely well written Pytorch library with hosted HTML documentation, etc, and it wouldn't even show up on the first page of Google search results. Meanwhile, a couple of repos on Github with the same or similar names (of far lower quality) were in the top-5 results. The only way I could reliably find the repo is by adding "Gitlab" to the search terms. I'm also convinced that the repo would be quite popular were it posted on Github because many related Pytorch repos on Github with far poorer code quality and documentation have 1000+ stars. As much as I love Gitlab, it is very hard for me to use anything but Github when working on an Open Source Project that I want to get lots of eyeballs on and hopefully the satisfaction of having other users use my code.
- lucideer 7y ago
  It's worth mentioning that Gitlab does facilitate mirroring to Github in quite an easily configurable, pretty zero-maintenance way. This of course won't benefit Gitlab's SEO in the long run, but it does allow using Gitlab with less of the cons.

tikkabhuna 7y ago

Search in general in Gitlab is painful. Searches seem to require 3 or more characters, but if you put two you just don't see any results. No warning saying add more. Pretty intuitive. The file name search is pretty rapid though.

toupeira 7y ago
We have an ongoing project to enable Elasticsearch on gitlab.com, which will greatly improve this: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/153 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/153 There's also a dedicated Search team being built at the moment to focus just on this.
- tikkabhuna 7y ago
  That's good to know, thanks! Gitlab is one of the few products where I look forward to each release. You guys are doing a great job at keeping interest high and your communication is great.
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
Github search is not much better. I've resorted to using google search and append site:github.com to my query.

ndarwincorn 7y ago

When was the last time you found a project organically on GitHub?

lucideer 7y ago
Well, organically is a vague term. My usage of it was: go to GitLab/Hub and type into global site search box to find a project. This seemingly simple action does not work on Gitlab. To answer your question, I do the above often on Github. Probably found projects that way as recently as last week.
- ndarwincorn 7y ago
  Interesting. Site-wide search in both cases has almost always been next-to-useless for me.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
Not sure what counts as organic, but if I find a project that impresses me on github I often click through to their repos and scroll through to look for other gems. I found bottle.js that way a week ago. I also cross reference people from Twitter if they seem smart. And I click back and forth between NPM pages and GitHub pages to see people’s work. Some of that is pretty doable if they switched to Gitlab... except the Twitter cross reference, just because I would have to remember to search both gitlab and GitHub.

_coveredInBees 7y ago

A related note is that Github repos have much better SEO than gitlab repos. It is probably a combination of Github being weighted more heavily by search algorithms, but also because Github has a far better network effect. I've tried searching for a repo that is hosted on Gitlab, that is an extremely well written Pytorch library with hosted HTML documentation, etc, and it wouldn't even show up on the first page of Google search results. Meanwhile, a couple of repos on Github with the same or similar names (of far lower quality) were in the top-5 results. The only way I could reliably find the repo is by adding "Gitlab" to the search terms. I'm also convinced that the repo would be quite popular were it posted on Github because many related Pytorch repos on Github with far poorer code quality and documentation have 1000+ stars. As much as I love Gitlab, it is very hard for me to use anything but Github when working on an Open Source Project that I want to get lots of eyeballs on and hopefully the satisfaction of having other users use my code.

lucideer 7y ago
It's worth mentioning that Gitlab does facilitate mirroring to Github in quite an easily configurable, pretty zero-maintenance way. This of course won't benefit Gitlab's SEO in the long run, but it does allow using Gitlab with less of the cons.