It is a real cultural problem how engineers get more excited about machine learning than basic usability.<p>GitHub search can't even search for a literal string, let alone a regex. It can't search a subdirectory. Ranking is indistinguishable from random. It's been this way for years. How about building an actual, usable, basic code search and then getting all fancy with your machine learning?<p>I almost built my own "online git grep for GitHub" last year.
This might just be me, but does anyone else feel that GitHub's code search has other points that could be improved first?<p>My biggest gripe is that the other results show in seems to be totally random. For example, if I have a Java class called A and I search "class A" in code search, the actual A.java doesn't tend to show up anywhere near the front. I just tried this in a repo and the actual A.java file was on the last page of results when I searched "class A". The vast majority of the results before it didn't even have the words "class" and "A" next to each other, which A.java does...<p>Maybe I'm doing something wrong (I'd welcome any input on how to use code search correctly!), but it just feels like they're jumping the gun on trying to make their code search more advanced when the basic functionality doesn't work that well.
I would settle for the ability to use logical OR when searching issues/pull requests, or to combine multiple negated searches.<p>"is:pr is:open ( author:bob OR author:jim )"<p>The lack of this pretty basic functionality makes issue & PR search much less useful than it could be.
It is awesome that they are working on this, but can I just say there are a lot of basic search features they need to add before "doing the hard thing". Here are some things that I should be able to do easily but can't (or can't very easily or well) using GitHub's search mechanism:<p>1. exact or close string searches for code that involves ![]{}_-*() etc characters<p>2. searches across past commits (e.g. find a line that used to be in the code)<p>4. search across pull request + comments (not just issues and commit messages)<p>5. advanced search operators -- there should be a full filtering UI with ands and ors etc<p>Because of this I often find my self grepping locally, or (more often) totally out of luck.
Now that’s what I call a misfeature!<p>GitHub is used by programmers. Surprisingly, they tend to be very good at telling computers <i>precisely</i> what they want, in the computers’ own language.<p>Natural language search is the exact opposite of this, invented for mom & pops who start their search phrase with “Dear Google, I’d like to search for ...”.
GitHub is building some amazing stuff recently, I guess now that Microsoft is going to acquire them, there's far less pressure on making Github Enterprise profitable..
I saw this created in another thread and it seems to accurately sum up the comments here:
<a href="https://imgflip.com/i/2i90x2" rel="nofollow">https://imgflip.com/i/2i90x2</a>
Devs don't search code repositories using natural language queries, and any scenarios of searching for code examples that way are already extremely well handled by StackOverflow and Google.<p>This is an incredible waste of time and resources that could be spent making the existing search far better with very minor tweaks. A perfect example of big company project management where nobody seems to know what their users actually want.
Dear GitHub,<p>Please build search that lets me actually find a given file by name.<p>You are busy building a space rocket when all we want is a bicycle. Impressive, but useless for just popping down to the shops.<p>Love,<p>The rest of the world's developers