GitHub Unveils Revamped Search Engine After 18 Months

The developers’ favourite code hosting platform GitHub has (finally!) released its updated code search engine. Two years after GitHub laid out plans to improve code search today their new code search and code view are generally available to all users on GitHub.com.

In a blog post the company stated, the goal is to enable developers to quickly find critical information scattered across their codebase, put that information into context, to increase productivity. Furthermore, GitHub claims it is infusing intelligence into every aspect of software development.

The updated version has an entirely redesigned search interface, with suggestions, completions, and the ability to slice and dice the results. Second, the new code search engine is completely from scratch that understands code, giving priority to the most relevant results. 

Use cases 

The updated code search feature is a guide for fixing bugs. Developers can use it to quickly pinpoint the cause of a bug or error message across all of an organisation's code at once. Similarly, searching for specific configuration files or security vulnerabilities is made easier with the new tool. Usually, an error message pops up and that’s it. With the new feature the result is a constant called queryErrorIsNothing which contains the error string.

In another example, the search tool can be used to find all YAML configuration files containing the word "memory," enabling developers to quickly identify the Kubernetes configuration files for their team's services and determine how much memory they have. This information can then be shared with the infrastructure team for further analysis and discussion.

Lastly, finding a security vulnerability is made easy with the update, too. For instance, React users are familiar with the prop dangerouslySetInnerHTML. It allows you to directly inject HTML into an element using a string. But it can be a  vulnerability if the string being injected into the DOM is untrusted.

Earlier this year, GitHub announced  BlackBird,  a new code search engine that can function at the GitHub scale. Written in Rust, it creates and incrementally maintains a code search index shared by Git blob object ID.  In a blog post, GitHub engineer Timothy Clem noted that it currently provides access to almost 45 million GitHub repositories. 

Read more: Rust Turns GitHub’s Long-standing Problem to Dust