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Perhaps it could benefit from something like a "dissimilarity" filter, which ranks the current result set by returning the most unique hits first. You wouldn't

Perhaps it could benefit from something like a "dissimilarity" filter, which ranks the current result set by returning the most unique hits first. You wouldn't always want this, because sometimes you're searching for how something is typically used, and with many duplicative results you can confirm that's the preferred pattern. But other times you're looking for more estoteric usage of a certain function, and it would be nice to filter the "standard usage" from the results (although you can already do this with carefully chosen negated keywords). Personally, I'm happy with the new code search so far. I stopped using Sourcegraph because I could never get the deeper results I wanted - it would just return the top five repositories including some common code snippet and I couldn't explore further than that. GitHub Code Search doesn't seem to have this problem to such a degree, since I can use negation more naturally, and since my query is not limited to some shallow subset of the corpus before refining it.

sqs 4y ago
Re: Sourcegraph, we're working on improving that, and sorry you couldn't get the results you wanted. We primarily build for the code within customers, where this particular problem is less common than across all open-source repositories. But we want it to work really well in every case. Our new ranking (https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/new-search-ranking https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/new-search-ranking) should help a lot here, and it's live on https://sourcegraph.com https://sourcegraph.com. Can you share some of the queries you tried so we can see how much ranking helps and how to handle them better?
- chatmasta 4y ago
  Sure! I will try it next time I'm using code search. I can't remember the specific queries I've tried, but I only ever used it when looking for "how have people used this function," so I remember the limited depth of results being particularly annoying. Thanks for the link to your blog post. I didn't realize Steve Yegge had joined your team - congratulations, that's quite an endorsement! I've always liked Sourcegraph just because our company names are so similar (founder of Splitgraph here)... we might have even gotten a few candidates because of that initial confusion. :) How has GitHub Code Search impacted your product direction? Do you see it as an opportunity to focus more on the internal use case, or do you have plans for some other differentiation? It's always unfortunate when a big company introduces a product so similar to the core product of a startup, but I'm sure there is a silver lining there, especially when you have a talented team and a mature codebase (for example, Fly.io has been able to carve out a niche for itself despite Cloudflare moving to compete in the same areas). Either way, best of luck to you from a fellow S-grapher!

sqs 4y ago

Re: Sourcegraph, we're working on improving that, and sorry you couldn't get the results you wanted. We primarily build for the code within customers, where this particular problem is less common than across all open-source repositories. But we want it to work really well in every case. Our new ranking (https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/new-search-ranking https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/new-search-ranking) should help a lot here, and it's live on https://sourcegraph.com https://sourcegraph.com. Can you share some of the queries you tried so we can see how much ranking helps and how to handle them better?

chatmasta 4y ago
Sure! I will try it next time I'm using code search. I can't remember the specific queries I've tried, but I only ever used it when looking for "how have people used this function," so I remember the limited depth of results being particularly annoying. Thanks for the link to your blog post. I didn't realize Steve Yegge had joined your team - congratulations, that's quite an endorsement! I've always liked Sourcegraph just because our company names are so similar (founder of Splitgraph here)... we might have even gotten a few candidates because of that initial confusion. :) How has GitHub Code Search impacted your product direction? Do you see it as an opportunity to focus more on the internal use case, or do you have plans for some other differentiation? It's always unfortunate when a big company introduces a product so similar to the core product of a startup, but I'm sure there is a silver lining there, especially when you have a talented team and a mature codebase (for example, Fly.io has been able to carve out a niche for itself despite Cloudflare moving to compete in the same areas). Either way, best of luck to you from a fellow S-grapher!