5 ms·

They list things like "Fast" and "Regular Expressions", but what about correct results? I often use GitHub web search and it never finds terms which I know for

by welder 3y ago

They list things like "Fast" and "Regular Expressions", but what about correct results? I often use GitHub web search and it never finds terms which I know for a fact exist. After it fails to return results, I have to instead manually navigate to the file containing the search term and yes it's there.

lettergram 3y ago
Yup I was about to write something about how I quite literally clone & grep code bases after GitHub search fails probably half the time.
- jve 3y ago
  For repository wide search 1. Press dot "." 2. CTRL + SHIFT + F 3. Enjoy results powered by rg (ripgrep)
- welder 3y ago
  I just use sourcegraph it's faster than cloning usually.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Source graph is nice but completely overpriced. I have 500 people who want to search, maybe 1000. I’m not paying $100/user/year forever when I can just clone all thousand repos onto a drive and let people grep it. Grep is not as good, but the cost is like $500/year for infinite users vs $50m/year with a marginal cost for new users. Also, my general comment on pricing applies here. Copilot is $100/year. So I’m supposed to think being able to search my code is the same price as being able to write the code. Also, they are kind of in trouble because this will exactly be replaced once I just fork over $500/user/year for superchatgpt and it will definitely cover code search.
quartz 3y ago
The new UX does a really bad job of helping you realize when you're logged out and search results are being suppressed. It very much implies "zero results" when in fact it means to say "zero results, except in code, where there might be results, but you need to log in first to find out".
- parthdesai 3y ago
  Weird, I've never found that to be the case. There's a "flash" sort of message right at the top of the search results that says "Sign in to see results in the `x` org"
- welder 3y ago
  Sure but I was talking about incorrect results when logged in, and for public repos.
100k 3y ago
(I gave this talk and work on code search.) Sorry you've had a frustrating experience with the product. When we look into complaints about missing results, it's almost always one of two things. First, the repository is not indexed yet, but searching triggers indexing. Future searches work. Second, the files or the repo hit our documented limitations (https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/github-code-search/about-github-code-search#limitations https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/github-code-search/...). I think these limits are pretty reasonable, but we need to do a better job making it clear why content isn't in the index.
- degenerate 3y ago
  When a user search includes a non-indexed repository, GitHub needs to include a warning message along with the search results, something similar to what you just mentioned: "One or more repositories of this search is not yet indexed, please try your search later for accurate results." Likewise for the 2nd case.
  - 100k 3y ago
    For the repositories not in the index, we do show a message to try again later. For documents that have been excluded, we agree we need better visibility.
    - prepend 3y ago
      Do you list the repos not in the index?
- kadoban 3y ago
  What does "Exhaustive search is not supported" mean? (that phrase is from your link, in the bullet-points near the top)
  - 100k 3y ago
    It means that we have a result limit. If a term matches in a lot of files, not all the hits will be shown.
paulddraper 3y ago
GitHub search used to be amazing, then circa 2019(?) they nerfed it, I think because of security credential leakage.
- jokethrowaway 3y ago
  Nah, it's always been unreliable. Around 2016 a coworker wrote a code indexer for our private repos and we used that to find occurrences of things which were critical. We've been burnt sooo many times ('are you sure we changed all the occurrences of this in all our 3252 microservices?'). Between shoddy UX (the + being part of the code you were copying!), blatantly missing features for years (ZenHub, late GitHub actions), GitHub really succeeded only because of timing and network effect. The developers' community is quite powerful. I'm happy for the original team, but now it's just another MS acquisition I hope we'll stop using.

by welder 3y ago

lettergram 3y ago

Yup I was about to write something about how I quite literally clone & grep code bases after GitHub search fails probably half the time.

jve 3y ago
For repository wide search 1. Press dot "." 2. CTRL + SHIFT + F 3. Enjoy results powered by rg (ripgrep)
welder 3y ago
I just use sourcegraph it's faster than cloning usually.
- prepend 3y ago
  Source graph is nice but completely overpriced. I have 500 people who want to search, maybe 1000. I’m not paying $100/user/year forever when I can just clone all thousand repos onto a drive and let people grep it. Grep is not as good, but the cost is like $500/year for infinite users vs $50m/year with a marginal cost for new users. Also, my general comment on pricing applies here. Copilot is $100/year. So I’m supposed to think being able to search my code is the same price as being able to write the code. Also, they are kind of in trouble because this will exactly be replaced once I just fork over $500/user/year for superchatgpt and it will definitely cover code search.

quartz 3y ago

The new UX does a really bad job of helping you realize when you're logged out and search results are being suppressed. It very much implies "zero results" when in fact it means to say "zero results, except in code, where there might be results, but you need to log in first to find out".

parthdesai 3y ago
Weird, I've never found that to be the case. There's a "flash" sort of message right at the top of the search results that says "Sign in to see results in the `x` org"
welder 3y ago
Sure but I was talking about incorrect results when logged in, and for public repos.

100k 3y ago

(I gave this talk and work on code search.) Sorry you've had a frustrating experience with the product. When we look into complaints about missing results, it's almost always one of two things. First, the repository is not indexed yet, but searching triggers indexing. Future searches work. Second, the files or the repo hit our documented limitations (https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/github-code-search/about-github-code-search#limitations https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/github-code-search/...). I think these limits are pretty reasonable, but we need to do a better job making it clear why content isn't in the index.

degenerate 3y ago
When a user search includes a non-indexed repository, GitHub needs to include a warning message along with the search results, something similar to what you just mentioned: "One or more repositories of this search is not yet indexed, please try your search later for accurate results." Likewise for the 2nd case.
- 100k 3y ago
  For the repositories not in the index, we do show a message to try again later. For documents that have been excluded, we agree we need better visibility.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Do you list the repos not in the index?
kadoban 3y ago
What does "Exhaustive search is not supported" mean? (that phrase is from your link, in the bullet-points near the top)
- 100k 3y ago
  It means that we have a result limit. If a term matches in a lot of files, not all the hits will be shown.

paulddraper 3y ago

GitHub search used to be amazing, then circa 2019(?) they nerfed it, I think because of security credential leakage.

jokethrowaway 3y ago
Nah, it's always been unreliable. Around 2016 a coworker wrote a code indexer for our private repos and we used that to find occurrences of things which were critical. We've been burnt sooo many times ('are you sure we changed all the occurrences of this in all our 3252 microservices?'). Between shoddy UX (the + being part of the code you were copying!), blatantly missing features for years (ZenHub, late GitHub actions), GitHub really succeeded only because of timing and network effect. The developers' community is quite powerful. I'm happy for the original team, but now it's just another MS acquisition I hope we'll stop using.