[100k]

(I gave this talk and work on code search.)

Sorry you've had a frustrating experience with the product. When we look into complaints about missing results, it's almost always one of two things. First, the repository is not indexed yet, but searching triggers indexing. Future searches work. Second, the files or the repo hit our documented limitations (https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/github-code-search/...). I think these limits are pretty reasonable, but we need to do a better job making it clear why content isn't in the index.

[prepend]

> First, the repository is not indexed yet

I understand this is important. But the issue I have is that it’s hard or maybe impossible to know what’s been indexed and what isn’t.

I run a few orgs with hundreds of repos. Which are indexed? I don’t know.

This makes your search suck for my organization. I understand the reasons. They aren’t reasonable for me. I don’t want to search using your tool if it won’t work for my org.

Code search isn’t just for what’s popular. It needs to be for what is real and accurate.

[100k]

Yeah, we need to do better on the visibility of this for owners. And we're trying to scale the system so it's not a problem at all. In the meanwhile, you can ask support to index all the repos in your orgs and we can take care of it.

[degenerate]

When a user search includes a non-indexed repository, GitHub needs to include a warning message along with the search results, something similar to what you just mentioned:

"One or more repositories of this search is not yet indexed, please try your search later for accurate results."

Likewise for the 2nd case.

[100k]

For the repositories not in the index, we do show a message to try again later. For documents that have been excluded, we agree we need better visibility.

[kadoban]

What does "Exhaustive search is not supported" mean? (that phrase is from your link, in the bullet-points near the top)

[100k]

It means that we have a result limit. If a term matches in a lot of files, not all the hits will be shown.