Bring back sort:indexed for code searches

[svennergr]

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On March 10th you informed public that you'll deprecate the sort parameter for code searches: https://github.blog/changelog/2023-03-10-changes-to-the-code-search-api/

I think this was done quite quickly - only 30 days after the deprecation notice.

Are there any plans to bring this feature back/to the new search API?

I think this is a very commonly used feature, which helps users to see most recent code changes containing some search term in a repo.

[clayne]

Yes, please bring this back. It makes it a total hassle to search for only recently updated repositories meaning both the client and server side are having to do excessive amounts of work and data transfer when the client code doesn't even want that.

Example: 10000 results, one only cares about the last 100 recently updated. With prior model this was easy. With current it forces the client to fetch the entire result set and then post-filter. Total regression.

[carcabot]

Wtf, you have just broke the entire GitHub usability without a concrete search method like sorting code by date. Competition is waiting for such mistakes.

[nashbuddhav]

Must have feature

[mitzk215]

indeed a very common and useful feature that must be present !

[DeathKnight813]

Good Advice

[tglam03]

Very Good

[Damian89]

This is one of the worst decisions github made... I am using this feature extensively. If they drop it, code search is just garbage search.

[deenrookie]

This is one of the worst decisions github made... I am using this feature extensively. If they drop it, code search is just garbage search.

I can't agree more

[Milan-960]

Indeed, I agree! It has also removed Sort by: From the code search!

[Aidils60]

super angreeee

[Marius-Ar]

Yes, made CS almost unusable 😢

[DarkReaperBoy]

yeah i need to find shadowsocks config

[kero3009destiny]

Maybe openly admitting to misuse the feature won't help bring it back.

[Damian89]

Not that they removed a useful feature - the new version outputs no data... besides that... I dont want to see 10 year old code as example for anything. this sucks massively... but I dont think we will see this feature again, Microsoft doesnt care.

[alexanderbkl]

I'm using it, it's incredibly awful that they removed that feature.

[trompx]

Besides not being able to sort by recency, now if you want to see when the file has been updated, you have to hover the filename.
For some searches, I want to see how developers are solving problems nowadays, not 10 years ago.
No more number of matching files per language -> very bad for discoverability.
Not possible to filter by multiple languages anymore.
Such a downgrade. That's so annoying and make it totally unusable.

[colinwm]

Everyone, thanks for the feedback. We've definitely heard that sorting by date is a feature many people miss from the old code search.

Unfortunately due to the way our new code search index works (which you can read about in some detail in this blog post), implementing sorting by recency is complex.

We are thinking about way to make this work in the new code search system, but don't have a date for when it will be possible. I'll update again here once we have a more concrete plan.

[dklenowski]

don't get it? your not "sorting by recency" on the whole corpus, just the results.

[uBadRequest]

Hopefully you guys are saving lots of money with the drop in people making searches.😂 I wish I could revert back to old code search.

[Abd3lh4di]

Please turn on the old search feature again, Github became useless to me as I only get result from very old code. please do something!

[anthonyalayo]

Can we get an update?

[johndpope]

@colinwm - can you maybe hire some people that could help ?
maybe ask chatgpt? maybe open source the search feature?
in sql there's a field "sort by". jeah, that should do it. just use this.

[sixgodfan]

Please allow us to revert to the old search in the meantime +1

[serdkc]

please enable old search .

[Baiyuetribe]

Please turn on the old search feature again

[Jamescordon111]

Please make a way for us to use old functionality of search. As my works is immensely effected by that. It's an humble request 🙏

[dev-oneclick]

Please give us the option to use the old version, this is disturbing a lot, the user can have the option of which of the two models to use.

[unprofitable]

+1, you cant do anything without searching...

[franz101]

At least make it filterable by date

[enriqueg]

Please bring the old search back. Why force everybody to use something that doesn't work and it is a UI disaster :(

[rickgm]

Is it still the case that "GitHub Code Search will only index repositories that have had recent activity within the last year"?

[look]

No, that changelog entry applied to the old code search system. The new system doesn't include every repository, but if you search a repository that isn't included, it will be added to the index and kept up to date.

[rickgm]

Thanks. So you are saying that if you search all the repos under an org "org:blah meow" that the search will apply to all repos in the org and not just repos that have activity in the last year?

[look]

Yes, it will include all the repositories in blah that are indexed.

[immensespace]

It's been over a year since this has been posted, are there any updates as to why we can't use sort:indexed?

Thanks for this context @benjsilverstein. It sounds like you have a lot of duplicated code and therefore finding the most recent examples is very useful to you. It's really helpful to hear examples like this to prioritize work on sorting.

We have definitely heard loud and clear that people want to be able to sort by recency. As I've mentioned in previous responses, the way it was implemented previously does not work for our new code search, because we rebuild the index frequently and the initial build would give everything the same date. We would like to implement this using the time the file was committed, but that is not easy to access in Git due to how data is stored in a repository.

@look posted that it's been heard loud and clear, and that was in July of 2023. If anything, I assume it's been heard louder and clearer in the year since.

For my use cases, I often look at APIs that change rapidly. It's therefore incredibly helpful to be able to sort by date, as often different repos are using different APIs. It's useless to look at a repo that's 2 years or older, and often the new code search is giving me results from 5 years ago.

[look]

Thanks for describing your use case, that's helpful for us to understand how people would like to use date-based sorting. This hasn't been implemented because it's difficult to implement correctly. I posted some details about that here: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/121777#discussioncomment-9375680

[le2Ks]

They will never fix it bro...

[zb3]

This hasn't been implemented because it's difficult to implement correctly.

Is there anything that is easy to implement correctly, given GitHub scale? Are you saying that this problem is too difficult for Microsoft? Haha, come on.. Mentioning technical difficulties here is kinda disrespectful..

Now, obviously, I see, this costs. For me, code search is the most useful feature here, so advanced search could even be a paid feature that's part of the core of the product!

[sleep-ops]

I'd be happy to implement it

[alechemy]

Until sort by date is restored, it'd be great to at least show the date in the results (I would hope that this is not also a heavy technical burden).

Right now, I have no way of knowing whether the code is 5 weeks, 5 months, or 5 years old until I click on a result.

[johndpope]

... or somebody build a browser plugin to go off and load each individual results

• come back with the date - and show in some sort of popover.

But seriously - is there a timeline to completely replace search architecture with an LLM across all code ?

[Mistik]

bring it back..

[Sergei-TOL]

bring it back +1!!!

[NoPurposeInLife]

why is this even removed in the first place??? bring it back !

[0x1881]

bring it back!

[Mistik]

bring it back if you are cool

[os3albert]

any alternative?

[johndpope]

microsoft seems like they have done a good job burying this feature.
needs to be publicly scrutinized - why doesn't this work?
official response - "oh, we dont know how too complicated in how we changed things (that were working fine) ....and.... do you have a valid use case?"
just give me the llm ai version.

[steveepreston]

This is still missing

[miztizm]

📖 The GitHub Code Search Disaster That Broke a Million Developer Workflows
👆 PLEASE UPVOTE to keep this visible. The more developers who see this, the more pressure GitHub faces to actually fix this mess.

We've been patient for 2+ years. It's time for the entire developer community to know what GitHub/Microsoft has done to our workflows.

Share this everywhere. Let's make some noise. 🔥

[steveepreston]

What is this for?

[lazuee]

@steveepreston clickbait

[JohnMatthiasWabwire]

Use https://github.com/topics/

Truth

@svennergr Everyone is getting upset for no reason. GitHub has multiple code search options and GitHub Topics are my personal favorite. GitHub Repository Search for Organizations and Profiles is also excellent. Features removed from GitHub Global Code Search and GitHub Repository Code Search are removed to save GitHub money, and to prevent the bankruptcy of the company. Extremely inefficient Large Language Models and horrifically inefficient machine learning models are being forced on every single company in the world at the cost of profitability, electricity, nuclear power and mineral resources of all kinds. Blood and treasure is being spilled to keep inherently inefficient systems running. The human brain only consumes 20 Watts of Electric Charge. The entire human body only consumes 100 Watts of Electric Charge.

[JohnMatthiasWabwire]

@svennergr You have to choose, make a choice. Do you want Large Language Models and Machine Learning Models which are inexcusably inefficient or do you want GitHub Global Code Search and GitHub Repository Code Search? You can only choose one and that is what everyone in this discussion fails to understand. If you don't like the truth that Machine Learning inefficiency is costing you the efficiency of your tooling, then you have no legitimate argument and the irony and hypocrisy is lost in compilation.

[steveepreston]

Don't spam here.