[HN Gopher] GitHub code search beta signup
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       GitHub code search beta signup
        
       Author : mmq
       Score  : 84 points
       Date   : 2022-11-09 20:48 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | andrewmcwatters wrote:
       | > Way more than grep.
       | 
       | Heck, it'd be nice if the current system right now at least did
       | grep with users being able to toggle POSIX options. It doesn't
       | even do that.
       | 
       | Instead, I have to clone the entire repo to do a trivial lookup.
       | To be fair, supporting this would require GitHub to do the
       | compute themselves, but I have no idea what they could possibly
       | be doing right now that's more effective.
        
       | 100k wrote:
       | Hello from the GitHub code search team! I'm really proud of this
       | release. It's the result of a year of hard work from multiple
       | teams to bring the custom code search engine we built for
       | cs.github.com to github.com. In the background, we've also spent
       | a lot of time since the launch rebuilding the index format to let
       | us scale up the system.
       | 
       | My colleague Tim Clem will be speaking at GitHub Universe today
       | about some of technical details:
       | https://githubuniverse.com/events/detail/virtual-schedule/49...
        
         | sytelus wrote:
         | Last time when I heard this, the GitHub search was the
         | shittiest search ever I came across. It didn't had even basic
         | dedup. You search for something and there will be 10 pages of
         | results with exact same code from thousand forks. The intern
         | guy who worked on it claimed he had used "AI" however.
        
           | sytelus wrote:
           | Looks as non-promising as before: https://cs.github.com/?scop
           | eName=All+repos&scope=&q=gpt2+tra...
        
         | anonymoushn wrote:
         | Can you search for special characters, and are large files
         | indexed?
        
           | 100k wrote:
           | All characters are indexed (UTF-8 only). Files larger than
           | 350 KiB are currently excluded, though we welcome feedback on
           | use cases that require larger files to be indexed.
        
         | jdorfman wrote:
         | Congrats on the launch Luke =)
        
           | 100k wrote:
           | Thanks! Nothing like a little friendly competition... :)
        
             | jdorfman wrote:
             | 100% =)
        
         | schroeding wrote:
         | A few weeks earlier and I could have _not_ be forced to hack
         | together a tool to search for specific repos in specific
         | languages that contain certain code-snippets by scraping the
         | existing search API for a week. :P
         | 
         | Joking aside though, looks really great, thank you so much! :D
        
         | IshKebab wrote:
         | Does this have any relation to https://grep.app/ ?
        
           | 100k wrote:
           | No, it is a custom-built search engine for code. grep.app is
           | great, though.
        
         | pjot wrote:
         | I've been in the beta (I guess the alpha) for a little over a
         | year now. It's absolutely fantastic and has been great to
         | understand, discover, and learn new code.
         | 
         | Great work!
        
       | semitones wrote:
       | This looks very similar to the internal code search product at
       | Google (called CodeSearch). If the quality of this is going to be
       | anywhere near that of CodeSearch, I would use it every day
        
       | thinkingemote wrote:
       | Does it still only index the primary/default branch of a
       | repository, or can it search within all branches? If it can now,
       | can we filter the search for stuff within the branches of forks
       | for a specific repository?
       | 
       | So many interesting work can only be found manually, laboriously
       | (but is so rewarding) within the explore network graph where
       | people work on their own branches in their own forks. Their code
       | is never found from the search function.
        
         | 100k wrote:
         | Currently, we index the head of the default branch. However,
         | the index format will support branch indexing, and we use that
         | functionality to index forks, which was not possible in prior
         | incarnations of GitHub code search. Indexing specific commits
         | (e.g., associated with a PR or feature branch) is on our
         | roadmap.
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | https://docs.sourcegraph.com/getting-started/github-vs-sourc...
         | highlights just such a comparison, and they have both
         | "fork:yes" and "fork:only" and their "rev:" keyword supports
         | branch globs
        
       | mcovalt wrote:
       | Is this the product that tree-sitter-graph [0] is being used for?
       | 
       | [0] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-graph
        
       | bonney_io wrote:
       | Inching closer and closer to each Github project page being one-
       | click away from a complete, web-based IDE.
        
       | revskill wrote:
       | Dark theme is the default theme now for modern web. I found it a
       | good thing.
        
       | adamnemecek wrote:
       | Does it dedup?
        
         | 100k wrote:
         | Content is deduplicated, yes.
        
       | canyonero wrote:
       | One feature for code search that I've wanted for some time that
       | could unlock some really interesting results would be to allow
       | search to reach into the git file history.
       | 
       | I've found myself sometimes thinking that something existed in a
       | particular codebase and I go to look for only to discover that
       | I'm unable find it. Then, I realize that the code I was looking
       | for has been removed. I can only find it by browsing back into
       | the history figuring out the events that led to the deletion or
       | change. Being able to search the history would be killer IMO.
        
         | sdesol wrote:
         | This is something that I'm working on and I believe a couple of
         | others as well. My solution won't be available until early next
         | year though, as indexing public repos at scale is far from
         | trivial and I'm expecting this will consume over 40TB of fast
         | storage to be performant.
        
         | LifeIsBio wrote:
         | I've run into this exact situation multiple times. Searching
         | the whole history would be revolutionary.
        
           | slimsag wrote:
           | FWIW you can do this with Sourcegraph today, searching over
           | both diffs (code changes)[0] and commit messages[1]:
           | 
           | [0] https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+repo:%5Eg
           | ith...
           | 
           | [1] https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+repo:%5Eg
           | ith...
           | 
           | (I work there, just commenting on my own though. we're all
           | pretty happy to have competition, more awareness of code
           | search, etc.)
        
         | durazabu wrote:
         | Are you familiar with git pickaxe?
         | 
         | For example: git log -pS 'deletedvar'
        
           | disqard wrote:
           | Thank you for sharing that! TIL.
        
       | elforce002 wrote:
       | It's in beta. Will this service have a free version for
       | individuals and organizations?
        
         | 100k wrote:
         | This is addressed in the FAQ. It will be included with GitHub,
         | just like the current code search.
        
       | zbhoy wrote:
       | Is this a Sourcegraph killer or does SG have other features that
       | still keep it competitive?
        
         | jdorfman wrote:
         | We (Sourcegraph) have other features to stay competitive. One
         | thing we have been working on indexing other code hosts like
         | Eclipse Foundation, Crates.io, etc.
         | 
         | We put this together anticipating these questions:
         | https://docs.sourcegraph.com/getting-started/github-vs-sourc...
         | 
         | We also just launched Search Ranking and Relevance:
         | https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/new-search-ranking
         | 
         | More to come! And BTW we are happy to have competition, GitHub
         | is a great brand and it will only make code search better for
         | all developers.
        
           | zbhoy wrote:
           | Thanks for the response and for having a doc ready. Code
           | search definitely seems to be on the rise as a needed tool
        
             | jdorfman wrote:
             | You're welcome. We agree, good times ahead =)
        
       | juujian wrote:
       | Honestly, I have caught myself looking for an advanced search
       | option on my github page more than a couple of times. Just to
       | remember that it does not exist. Long overdue!
        
         | YetAnotherNick wrote:
         | Press . in any repo and then search :)
        
       | throwaway743 wrote:
       | Digging it. Fingers crossed github's app search options are
       | updated as well
        
       | hbn wrote:
       | I've been using this since January and it's become a near daily
       | tool for me. Very good stuff
        
       | eximius wrote:
       | My only problem with the new code search is I've noticed some
       | examples where exact string searches fail to locate some matches.
       | I was looking for callers of a function and assumed no results
       | meant no callers. But a simple 'search all' in VS Code found
       | results missing from GitHub code search.
        
       | acedTrex wrote:
       | I have been using cs.github.com religiously since it originally
       | went into beta and it has increased productivity for me to insane
       | levels. There are many features I still want but its usually
       | *good enough
        
       | davea37 wrote:
       | A couple of years ago you stopped indexing repos that hadn't had
       | activity for a year [0]. Will such repos be indexed by the new
       | code search?
       | 
       | [0]: https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-17-changes-to-code-
       | sea...
        
         | 100k wrote:
         | Our ultimate goal is to surpass the current code search index.
         | As of today, there are about 25 million repositories in the new
         | index, but we have more work to do before we reach full scale.
        
       | pamelafox wrote:
       | I used this recently when I was searching for examples of CPython
       | extensions implementing a particular feature, and it actually did
       | help me find what I was looking for! I also used it when looking
       | for examples of Github action workflows that did particular
       | things. It's nice that you can use the path: option to specify
       | the file extension and/or the path to the file.
        
       | bottlepalm wrote:
       | Developers, developers developers! Very happy Microsoft bought
       | Github.
        
       | jo_the_zeroton wrote:
       | HUGE
        
       | barbazoo wrote:
       | This will also improve the github.com code search, right? I
       | always found it frustrating that I couldn't really search for
       | exact strings, even using quotes. I hope this fixes that too.
        
         | 100k wrote:
         | This will become the new github.com code search. Last year, we
         | launched a Technology Preview of our new code search as a
         | standalone site: cs.github.com. Today, we're bringing that
         | powerful code search, plus a redesigned code navigation UX, to
         | github.com.
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-09 23:02 UTC)