A Whole New Code Search

Finding great code on GitHub just got a whole lot easier. Today we’re releasing several big improvements to code search.

New Technology

First, we are unveiling our new search infrastructure that will grow to support the immense amount of source code being pushed to GitHub each day.

Under the hood is an ElasticSearch cluster that live-indexes your code as you push it up to GitHub. Search results will be returned from public and private repositories that you have access to.

To ensure better relevancy, we’re being conservative in what we add to the search index. Repository forks will not be searchable unless the fork has more stars than the parent repository, for example.

New Design

The code search landing page has been redesigned as well. When you’re logged in, the search field has the command bar built in.

Advanced Search

The new advanced code search page helps you discover what you can search. You can filter by things like number of stars, number of forks, or file extension. As you fill in the advanced search fields below, it will show you the advanced query above.

Repository Results

Each repository result now includes repository activity. This’ll help you scan the results for more active repositories.

The most exciting part is repository results now include your private repos!

Code Results

The code search results have also been redesigned, including a bunch of new magic that we didn’t have before. Here are a few of the improvements:

• Line numbers in results
• Code syntax highlighting
• Last indexed time
• Search by file extensions
• Search by path
• Limit by owner or project

Developer Results

We cleaned up the user results page leaving just what you need: accurate results, and the ability to follow users directly from those results.

Happy searching!

Written by

Tim Pease

@TwP