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GitHub code search is generally available

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Re: GitHub code search is generally available

#21
post #9
post #2

I have been using since the beta, truly the most impressive product released in the last 5 years (along with chatgpt). The amount of indexed code, the quickness and the precision of this search is simply stunning.

Could you elaborate more on why this is a significant feature? I can see how it would be handy to search a codebase online, especially one you don't have cloned locally, but for my own codebases, I can search the entire thing just fine in VS Code with ctrl-shft-f.

I think others have pretty much summarised it already:

Searching for non-documented or badly documented API, find implementation of an algorithm or specific pattern, find how people are using a niche tool, etc.

I have even used it to find my own API in the wild to look for potential breaking changes and improvements to do.

Re: GitHub code search is generally available

#23
Surprised more people aren't talking about how Microsoft has a near monopoly on the developer ecosystem. They've got GitHub, OpenAI, and VS Code all working together and collecting data that strengthen each other's products while also using their embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with WSL and all of these steer people towards Azure services whenever possible. Seems like something that verges on an anti-trust situation when you think about the flywheel effect data has for AI

credit to Microsoft for rehabbing their reputation with developers but it seems like a massive trojan horse

Re: GitHub code search is generally available

#24
post #2

I have been using since the beta, truly the most impressive product released in the last 5 years (along with chatgpt). The amount of indexed code, the quickness and the precision of this search is simply stunning.

Is the difference that now the basic search functionality actually works?

The previous standard GitHub search I found to be remarkably bad. I would be looking at some small public repo, search for an exact string match I know exists in the code, scope the search to that repo only, and still see zero results. Even copy-pasting a line of code from a file in the repo often resulted in zero matches.

Re: GitHub code search is generally available

#26

Surprised more people aren't talking about how Microsoft has a near monopoly on the developer ecosystem. They've got GitHub, OpenAI, and VS Code all working together and collecting data that strengthen each other's products while also using their embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with WSL and all of these steer people towards Azure services whenever possible. Seems like something that verges on an anti-trust situa…

I guess Steve Ballmer was right all along...

Re: GitHub code search is generally available

#27
post #7

I'm Colin from GitHub's code search team, happy to answer any questions. For more info on how we built this, you can check out our technical blog post from a few months ago https://github.blog/2023-02-06-the-technology-behind-githubs...

Are you planning to release code search as open source? I can’t find a link to the source code anywhere.

Re: GitHub code search is generally available

#28

Surprised more people aren't talking about how Microsoft has a near monopoly on the developer ecosystem. They've got GitHub, OpenAI, and VS Code all working together and collecting data that strengthen each other's products while also using their embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with WSL and all of these steer people towards Azure services whenever possible. Seems like something that verges on an anti-trust situa…

gitea

Re: GitHub code search is generally available

#29
post #12

I have missed Google Code Search, which launched in 2006 and was discontinued in 2013. Similar to GitHub's code search, it supported searching by regex and filtering by language etc. - but obviously the amount of code to search through is orders of magnitude larger than it was 10-15 years ago. Still I wonder what took GitHub so long to build this - it's hardly a novel idea, and it seems like such an obvious power too…

> Still I wonder what took GitHub so long to build this - it's hardly a novel idea, and it seems like such an obvious power tool for programmers to have.

Scale. You can read more about their engineering at https://github.blog/2023-02-06-the-technology-behind-githubs...

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