New and Improved Search

We hit two birds with one deploy today. First, some of you may have seen a very well reasoned constructive criticism of our header user block content on the 37Signals blog : Distinguishing decorative from meaningful elements in UI design.

It argued that the context of the search in our user box was misleading, and we agreed, so we redesigned the header so the user box only contains elements scoped to that user

and the search box is now separate:

Along with this, you may notice that if you use that search box, you get a very different looking results page than you used to.

Now when you search from the homepage or that search box, you will find results not only of the repositories that matched, but also of the users and code snippets that may match that term.

Additionally, you can search through any of those three categories individually and even filter down to pretty specific results with Lucene query syntax for the fields we expose.

For example, we can search for people with a username fuzzily similar to ‘chacon’ who use Ruby as their primary language, have at least 5 repos and at least one follower:

It’s a work in progress – you may run into some issues with the field filters for a bit and the indexes are still being filled out, but we think it’s better than it was and we hope it helps you find some cool people/projects/code.

Update:

Here are some interesting queries, so you can see more examples of the search syntax:

• 
  popular London based GitHubbers
• 
  large, popular repos pushed to in the last week
• 
  super popular forks

Written by

Scott Chacon

@schacon