One of my New Year’s resolutions for this year is to make GitHub search awesome. Today I’m happy to announce that Phase One of this project is complete, in the form of a totally redone Gist search:


There are a few new features to notice.

  1. Matched snippets are shown and specific matches are highlighted in yellow.
  2. Code is syntax highlighted if a proper filetype was specified.
  3. Multiple matches in a single Gist file will be shown (up to a max of 3 snippets).

In addition, the reliability and comprehensiveness of the index are vastly improved and a ranking formula has been put in place that we can easily tweak over time to dial in the best results.

As I mentioned, this is only the beginning of the search improvements that you can look forward to over the coming months. I aim to make GitHub search your first and best choice when it comes to finding the projects, people, and code that you care about.