It's a SHAME Github is trying to protect its search results.
I am often left in front of this situation when hunting for code using advanced search parameters -- they are preventing people from searching efficiently.
Does anyone know what is their motivation behind this?
Not really sure what you're getting at, but I'm assuming you mean searching for specific syntax or language aspects.
GitHub's definitely not "protecting" shit; it's just that search is a hard problem, and searching code is a really hard problem, at least at the scale they're at. They're running one of the largest Elasticsearch clusters in the world, and a lot of significant things in code are stop words (or not words at all) in most search databases. Not to mention you need to invalidate entire repo indexes when you force push, etc. It just takes a lot of resources, and like anything, will get better over time.
I was under the impression that since the page returned 404 after being posted here, they removed the ability to search using these filters, at the very broad range it was used at.
Now the page is back and I'm not sure what to make of it.
It's not going to be an easy job to be fair - I also find the search frustrating - I would appreciate the creation of an overarching (elasticsearch?) index across all their stores but I would quake at implementing it.
It's a frustrating thankless task to do it of course, but looking for a competitive moat - that will make gitlab and Atlassian quake.
I am often left in front of this situation when hunting for code using advanced search parameters -- they are preventing people from searching efficiently.
Does anyone know what is their motivation behind this?