
GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in - zhuxuefeng1994
http://web.archive.org/web/20160318143021/https://github.com/
======
mgraupner
This feels like a move away from offering the greatest opensource project
hosting site to a walled garden. I was just browsing some repository and found
a non linked reference to another project which probably is also on Github but
there is no way of searching for it when I'm not logged in (and knowing the
search URL somebody posted earlier). Pretty big UI fail and I wonder if this
was intentional and if so if they took into account the annoyed users... I
hope this will gain some more attion than the 6 comments right now, I really
like Github for just browsing and exploring new projects, no need to be logged
in for doing this and hopefully not just the first step to a more business
driven Github.

~~~
matt_o
I feel like this is a part of a trend that reflects how github itself is
changing - slowly making access to things harder, then finally removing it.

Github used to have an awesome and public way to explore projects
([http://web.archive.org/web/20130730125837/https://github.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130730125837/https://github.com/explore))
- I remember using it a lot to look for projects to learn to read code because
it allowed me to easily find projects by language. They replaced it with a
flashier, but in my experience, much less useful tool that you have no control
over - [https://github.com/explore](https://github.com/explore) .

I know I'm not the only one thinking of moving my repos to another provider or
perhaps a self-hosted solution because of this direction.

~~~
danmaz74
OTOH, a trend towards self hosted solutions will only make finding projects to
explore harder.

~~~
r0muald
Or create the demand for an index/curation platform/search engine, which would
be something quite interesting, I think.

~~~
nitrogen
Google had one but they shut it down.

------
gracenotes
I'm reminded of this section from "Reddit: Lessons Learned From Mistakes Made
Scaling To 1 Billion Pageviews A Month"
([http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/8/26/reddit-lessons-
lea...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/8/26/reddit-lessons-learned-from-
mistakes-made-scaling-to-1-billi.html)):

> _Treat nonlogged in users as second class citizens._ By always giving logged
> out always cached content Akamai bears the brunt for reddit’s traffic. Huge
> performance improvement.

I have ended up using this philosophy in a website I've been working on
lately, where people can post puzzles from The Witness. This includes
simplifying decisions such as not tracking solved puzzles unless you have a
user id, and not allowing navigating to a random puzzle either, as this
routine depends on stored solves and upvotes. Supporting not-logged-in users
just means extra code for me.

In general, I don't think this is a bad attitude for a website to have.

It is perhaps different in the case of GitHub, a highly depended-on and well
established website which is actually removing functionality here. I would
still assume good faith about the reason. And mobile login rates are a problem
for everyone, I'm pretty sure, not just GitHub.

------
vc98mvco
Search is still there [https://github.com/search](https://github.com/search)
although there is no link to it from the main page:
[https://github.com](https://github.com). Try and find it if you can!

However the search inside a repo is missing now and using _site:_ to search
inside a repo doesn't seem to work with Google.

~~~
crazyhatfish
Search inside a repo is still available just append _/ search_ to the url.

~~~
cremno
Or “repo:”:
[https://github.com/search?l=&q=repo%3Atorvalds%2Flinux+fuck&...](https://github.com/search?l=&q=repo%3Atorvalds%2Flinux+fuck&ref=advsearch&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93)

------
sdesol
This seems like a good time to advertise my search engine for GitHub and
Bitbucket. You can learn a little more about it at

[http://gitsense.github.io](http://gitsense.github.io)

And as the screen shot below shows, you don't need to be logged in, to search
a repository.

[http://imgur.com/W1Qx59h](http://imgur.com/W1Qx59h)

To make the long story short, you can install our indexing engine on low cost
platforms like $10 VPS plans from DigitalOcean/Vultr or on dated hardware like
a 6 year old Dell laptop:

[http://gitsense.github.io/blog/benchmarking-
march-14-2016.ht...](http://gitsense.github.io/blog/benchmarking-
march-14-2016.html)

~~~
ryan-c
How much of github do you index? I was just raging this morning about how
annoying it is that github ignores symbols when searching.

~~~
sdesol
Right now we are indexing about 5,000 repos. We'll probably stop at 50,000
since we index an order of a magnitude more than GitHub does per repo. Our
objective isn't really to index as many repos as possible, but rather we are
focused on making it insanely easy for others to index what ever repos they
want.

------
Cartwright2
I was banging my head against this earlier last week. It was such a jarring
change to visit GitHub and not be able to navigate. It gives me pause to see
how suddenly an easily-navigable site can become almost impenetrable with the
removal of a single search bar. What are they thinking? The "Explore" menu is
worse than useless, too.

It is an interesting case study in UX - the difference between a great
experience and an awful one can come down to a single, well placed search box.

What is GitHub's rationale behind this jarringly awful, blatantly bad
decision?

~~~
mchaver
For me search if one of GitHub's key features. It's nice to take a look other
people's code, explore other coding styles, find examples of library usage
which is great for under documented code.

Unfortunately it does let you escape common characters that are common in
code, doesn't give you the option of maintaining white space/line breaks in
your query, doesn't let you search in other branches.

------
tuttifrutti
Well, it GitHub wants people to switch over to Gitlabs, they should just
continue doing this stuff.

------
xkarga00
Really bad move by Github. I sent them an e-mail nagging about it the very
first moment I noticed it. I cannot imagine that they didn't expect any
reactions, they just seem to not care about the whole open source community. I
am looking for alternatives to it already.

------
franze
[https://github.com/search](https://github.com/search)

~~~
simoncion
True, but the search bar remains unavailable when you've used
github.com/search to _navigate_ to a repo.

This is a serious regression.

Off-topic: @dang, can we get a "Upvote this comment if has less than 1 point,
else don't upvote it" button?

~~~
narsil
> Off-topic: @dang, can we get a "Upvote this comment if has less than 1
> point, else don't upvote it" button?

The font-color of the comment (aside from links already visited) should be
enough to indicate if it has positive or negative karma. Individuals can
decide whether to upvote or downvote further at that point.

~~~
DanBC
Wasn't HN experimenting with not greying comments that had a single downvote?
I think this was an attempt to avoid downvote pile ons.

I'm not sure it's still happening. I think it stopped the people who provide
corrective upvotes.

------
x1798DE
Is this a new change? I was really annoyed by this today when trying to
navigate a repository on mobile. Pretty annoying.

~~~
leeoniya
Yes, this looks new...and terrible as it further silos discover-ability, which
instead should be _easier_ for open source projects.

Github's mobile experience has been pretty bad in general. their mobile view
doesnt even have the primary feed D: Instead it has a "repositories you
contribute to", which is probably the most useless thing I could imagine for a
logged-in view.

~~~
r3bl
This is not the only problem I have with a mobile version.

Yesterday, I tried finding my own issue that I submitted two minutes ago to
update it with a screenshot from my phone. Had to type in the full URL
manually at the end.

I love being able to quickly edit my notes from my phone, but no, I have to
revert to the desktop version to be able to edit the file.

Not being able to see my feed is definitely a huge disadvantage.

All in all, I use the desktop version quite a lot. At least it's easy to
switch to it.

------
AtticHacker
I personally don't like this and I hope Github decides to revert these changes
as it doesn't really fit the open spirit. However if you still want to search
and you're a duckduckgo user like me, simply use "bangs" in your url bar. e.g.

!github some-repo

------
jannic
My reaction when I wanted to searched for a file in a larger github repo, and
the search bar was missing: I just cloned the repo and used `git grep`
locally.

What's the next step? Cloning only allowed for logged-in users?

------
smoyer
I just noticed that yesterday ... and I think it's a bad idea. One of the
great benefits of the original SF and, until now, GitHub was the ability to
discover OSS software. I often knew what I was looking for but had absolutely
no idea what the project was named (and on Github it was already a bit harder
since you'd find multiple forks of the same project.

Since I commit and fetch repository data using SSH and a private key, I rarely
(if ever) log into the GitHub UI

I guess I see only down-sides from a user perspective - what are the upsides
for GitHub? Tracking?

------
Nutmog
Maybe it's to protect people who've accidentally included secrets in their
repos from automated searching to hack their AWS accounts?

~~~
OJFord
Wouldn't offer much protection.

~~~
Coding_Cat
None at all really because it's still possible to use search it's just hidden
from view.

------
mikey_p
Drupal.org recently did something similar with their issue tracker. Their
rationale was that it's a performance issue, and there were large numbers of
bots scraping the site using the advanced issue search. Requiring login for
issue search allowed them to find out who was scrapping and then they could
talk to them about what API improvements they needed, etc.

------
gumby
I rarely use a site's own search anyway. Just use the site: keyword and do a
google search.

For example:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=monty+python+site:github.com](https://www.google.com/search?q=monty+python+site:github.com)

------
alkonaut
This makes it easy to block bots that repeatedly search for e.g credentials or
other sensitive information. Not sure if that is the rationale though?

~~~
fiatjaf
These bots probably use the API.

------
lightcatcher
I noticed this a few days ago at work. I don't want to sign in to my personal
Github account at work, but I'd still like to be able to search within a repo.
I've been searching for code snippets with Google recently with lower (but
non-zero) success rate.

------
zhuxuefeng1994
Archive on a repo
[http://web.archive.org/web/20160319164131/https://github.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160319164131/https://github.com/Rochester-
NRT/AlphaGo)

------
mchahn
Who uses github without being logged in? Why would you use it without being
logged in? When I saw the front-page in the wayback machine I realized I
hadn't seen the front-page in years. It certainly wasn't that fancy when I
signed up.

------
CydeWeys
This plus 2FA is a perfect combination for headaches. I'm already often not
logged in while browsing GitHub because 2FA on every login is a pain, and now
they're taking away features?

------
4lun
Even when logged in the search is not present on all pages, most notable
being: [https://github.com/explore](https://github.com/explore)

------
kmfrk
GitHub is a pain to log in to on mobile, especially with 2FA. It's absurd that
they would do something straight out of the Facebook playbook.

------
mkj
Maybe it was just disabled due to load issues from web crawlers, no bad
intent? Personally that seems the simplest explanation.

------
Gophyr
Just go to [https://github.com/search](https://github.com/search)

------
malditojavi
Not comparable but airpair have a similar trick, asking to signup if you want
to see their whole samples
[http://i.imgur.com/pVuVjrY.png](http://i.imgur.com/pVuVjrY.png) and not
obfuscated code samples

I run a site ([http://petihacks.com](http://petihacks.com)) with many of these
little tricks if it's the interest of anyone

~~~
pluma
That would put me off using the site, let alone registering. Especially if
it's meant to be social (i.e. I'm supposed to share links to content) -- I
don't want to burden other people with the same hassle.

------
hackerboos
The "Explore" link is also hidden unless you sign out.

------
oliwarner
_Facepalm_. In this thread: A lot of overreaction from a lot of people who
seem to expect the moon on a stick (for free) and who I could easily suspect
have never had to run a resource-intensive system before.

Doing search well is computationally hard. More than that, it's next to
impossible to cache for because there can be so many variants. All-in-all,
it's the ideal sort of system to attack if you want to DDoS somebody.

Making people sign in is a tiny barrier to entry that stops anons hammering
their system with uncacheable search requests.

Yes, there's probably also a business-marketing argument that goes into this
but if that's the sort of trade-off we need to keep Github free for open
source, indefinitely, I'm all for it.

And again, this is still free so stop being babies. If you don't like it
you're very free to clone the repos out and search them yourselves. Want
_your_ anons to be able to search your stuff? Host it yourself and manage your
own DDoSes.

~~~
buro9
Then one should get a couple of elastic search clusters, one for the guest
users to hammer and DDoS and one for the authenticated users.

Not only does this make the search cheaper and easier for the guests (just an
index of public repos, so no permissions involved), it makes it easier to
continue offering search to authenticated users whilst being able to mitigate
L7 DDoS on the authenticated search (just block the users involved in the
attack).

Besides, there is a huge SEO benefit to having a searchable and discoverable
interface, and a huge attention retention benefit to keeping users on your
site to search once they have arrived there. On top of that, Github understand
their data structures better than a search engine so it's easier to tune
complex searches just for a codebase, or blog, or issue.

There's really no benefit to hiding search, and having written many community
generated content sites the only reason I would hide search is as a stepping-
stone to making the content part of a walled garden.

It's fairly inevitable Github will want to do this, I imagine they're looking
at the number of users who are not signed-in or on free accounts as yet to be
monetised. They would want more activity data to make arguments for
advertising, or recruitment monetisation, or plan up-sell, etc.

That's where this makes sense, as a way to gather more user habit data.

~~~
true_religion
I feel like in our present age SEO is vastly overstated.

Google at one point gave you a lot indicators to which pages people were
landing on and why. Now all that information isn't shared with site operators,
so it's impossible to qualify statements like "internal searchable interface
lead to more Google search traffic".

Maybe it was true previously, maybe it was true even last month, but is it
still true with the latest Google update---no one can measure.

