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Comment on Changes to Code Search Indexing

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I noticed that something was amiss a year or so ago (IIRC) when they disabled global search for people not logged in.

This is sad, TBH. I've found global search very useful for searching for example-uses of rarely-used libraries. Having all that at my fingertips was useful.

I understand legacy examples aren't useful for everyone, but for me they often were, and now a lot of code will be completely unfindable. :/

Think of niche programming languages and the like that've passed their heyday - I guess tagging might help, but a lot of people don't bother tagging projects.

Also, I guess this includes one's own projects? I have about a hundred repos of various ages, and it's easy to lose track of them. Not being able to search through my own code sounds like a bit of a bummer (Though I don't have an intuition for how often I search for stuff in my own repos, TBH).

Pity there wasn't a better solution available to solve their problems.

The proper technical solution would be to use a proper search backend, not solr, more like xapian, and sort by relevance. Newer and more relevant first. Even google codesearch can do that properly. And still tons faster than a dynamic ripgrep, which has to read every file.

Skipping old code might improve the noise, but people will always complain

I think this will not affect third-party search like grep.app since they have their own index. It’s not as large but should help.

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