GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#41

Post by sdesol » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 11:45 AM UTC

This seems like a good time to advertise my search engine for GitHub and Bitbucket. You can learn a little more about it at

http://gitsense.github.io

And as the screen shot below shows, you don't need to be logged in, to search a repository.

http://imgur.com/W1Qx59h

To make the long story short, you can install our indexing engine on low cost platforms like $10 VPS plans from DigitalOcean/Vultr or on dated hardware like a 6 year old Dell laptop:

http://gitsense.github.io/blog/benchmarking-march-14-2016.ht...

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#42

Post by Cartwright2 » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 11:46 AM UTC

I was banging my head against this earlier last week. It was such a jarring change to visit GitHub and not be able to navigate. It gives me pause to see how suddenly an easily-navigable site can become almost impenetrable with the removal of a single search bar. What are they thinking? The "Explore" menu is worse than useless, too.

It is an interesting case study in UX - the difference between a great experience and an awful one can come down to a single, well placed search box.

What is GitHub's rationale behind this jarringly awful, blatantly bad decision?

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#43

Post by pygy_ » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 11:48 AM UTC

malditojavi wrote: post #35

Not comparable but airpair have a similar trick, asking to signup if you want to see their whole samples http://i.imgur.com/pVuVjrY.png and not obfuscated code samples I run a site ( http://petihacks.com ) with many of these little tricks if it's the interest of anyone

typo, I guess: http://petithacks.com/

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#44

Post by AtticHacker » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 12:06 PM UTC

I personally don't like this and I hope Github decides to revert these changes as it doesn't really fit the open spirit. However if you still want to search and you're a duckduckgo user like me, simply use "bangs" in your url bar. e.g.

!github some-repo

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#45

Post by smoyer » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 12:20 PM UTC

I just noticed that yesterday ... and I think it's a bad idea. One of the great benefits of the original SF and, until now, GitHub was the ability to discover OSS software. I often knew what I was looking for but had absolutely no idea what the project was named (and on Github it was already a bit harder since you'd find multiple forks of the same project.

Since I commit and fetch repository data using SSH and a private key, I rarely (if ever) log into the GitHub UI

I guess I see only down-sides from a user perspective - what are the upsides for GitHub? Tracking?

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#46

Post by 4lun » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 12:52 PM UTC

Even when logged in the search is not present on all pages, most notable being: https://github.com/explore

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#47

Post by alkonaut » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 1:06 PM UTC

This makes it easy to block bots that repeatedly search for e.g credentials or other sensitive information. Not sure if that is the rationale though?

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#48

Post by caleblloyd » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 1:07 PM UTC

danmaz74 wrote: post #14

mgraupner wrote: post #8

This feels like a move away from offering the greatest opensource project hosting site to a walled garden. I was just browsing some repository and found a non linked reference to another project which probably is also on Github but there is no way of searching for it when I'm not logged in (and knowing the search URL somebody posted earlier). Pretty big UI fail and I wonder if this was intentional and if so if they t…

I really wonder what the rationale behind this move is. I wouldn't even have noticed as I'm practically always logged in, but was that search bar lowering the conversion rates to free users, or what?

Probably because Github is constantly under DDOS attacks, search is computationally expensive, and they can't rate limit unauthenticated sessions. http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/26/github_wobbles_under_d...

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#49

Post by Zolomon » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 1:16 PM UTC

vc98mvco wrote: post #10

Search is still there https://github.com/search although there is no link to it from the main page: https://github.com . Try and find it if you can! However the search inside a repo is missing now and using site: to search inside a repo doesn't seem to work with Google.

This really makes it difficult to work when you switch between machines, for example switching to a coworker's

machine that doesn't necessarily have a github account or is not logged in.

I use 2FA and it's really disruptive to force a login when your intention is to perform a few quick search requests.

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#50

Post by fiatjaf » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 1:18 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #47

This makes it easy to block bots that repeatedly search for e.g credentials or other sensitive information. Not sure if that is the rationale though?

These bots probably use the API.