It's out-of-band signaling which eliminates the ambiguity between searching for "author=" and searching for an author. It's still probably bad user experience.

It's out-of-band signaling which eliminates the ambiguity between searching for "author=" and searching for an author. It's still probably bad user experience. I'm not sure if it's justifiable, given how GitHub code search mostly ignores punctuation (whuch I hate too), whereas GitLab seems more literal.