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/

    • lysdexic@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      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?

        • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          GitHub search simply won’t find search terms that I know are there (because I can grep them in my local repo). It also fails to search all branches. There’s also insufficient filtering for filetypes or paths.

          Maybe I’m just spoiled from having used OpenGrok, as well as knowing how to use basic tools like find and grep, all of which I find substantially more useful.

        • nous@programming.dev
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          11 months ago

          Just use the search bar… the only one they have that is on every page at the top right. That takes you to the results which defaults to code, but you can change it on the side to show repos, issues, prs, etc. You can even limit it to single repos or whole organisations.

      • MajorHavoc@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

    • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      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.