[HellzStormer]

Personally, I don't think this is a valid case of enshittifying. Products that you pay for that loses features or break or become more painful to use are enshittifying.

A free feature that stays free but requires you to make a free account (no credit card needed), I can see at least one very valid reason: if the feature heavier than a simple page (which is the case here), then it's an open door for DDOS attacks. Being able to track and ban/block the users that appear to participate in such an attack is totally valid.

The alternative is having to do captchas and the like to use those features anonymously, which is a pain both for user and for the devs/UI, and does feel more like the overall enshittification you are mentionning (even if it's a valid reason)

[amiga386]

> The alternative is having to do captchas and the like to use those features anonymously

This is not the case. You may have noticed that Google Search, Bing, etc. don't require login or captcha to do a search. Billions of people use this search daily. And yet, they will throw a captcha at you, or even just say "you're a bot, stop bothering us" whether you're logged in or not, if their signals have detected what they consider abuse.

Clearly, their signals are not as naive as "anonymous user, require captcha / logged-in user, no checks required". Preventing DDOS != requiring login.

They like you logged in because they can add more data to their verified user identity and activity datasets and sell them for more money. They already make enough money to run the service despite all the anonymous usage, but they'd like more money, you see.

Github managed to offer anonymous search for 16 years before one day Microsoft took it away. Do you think it was due to DDOS attacks, or do you think it was a power-play to attract more sign-ups and logins?

[Alupis]

> They already make enough money to run the service despite all the anonymous usage, but they'd like more money, you see.

How mighty of you, a freeloading user in this specific situation, to assert Github has made "enough" money and therefore should offer you services at their own expense... you know, because you want it and therefore are entitled to it.

> Github managed to offer anonymous search for 16 years before one day Microsoft took it away. Do you think it was due to DDOS attacks, or do you think it was a power-play to attract more sign-ups and logins?

So what's the issue here, really? Make a free account and move on with life. Or clone the repo and search it locally if you need to. Or decide to take some principled stance and refuse to work with projects hosted on Github. It's your choice.

[dsr_]

For the last seven months, Google has pushed every non-login search from my house network through a captcha; the image captcha is typically five to infinite repetitions. Audio captcha works after a single run-through, except that it is frequently "unavailable" now.

I don't know why. Google won't tell me. They just started doing the same for YouTube: "Please login because we have detected malicious behavior from your network".

I know I'm not DDOSing them; I can see all our network traffic. They're just encouraging me to avoid using them.

[kbolino]

As far as I can tell, mainline web search engines are mostly serving cached/canned responses these days. They get updated periodically but it's not the same as the late 90s or early 2000s when every search was run against large-scale content indexes. You can occasionally stack keywords or form unique enough queries that you force the engine to do real work, but getting this right seems to get harder and harder over time and their pool of content that's indexed seems to be broad but shallow now.

GitHub code search is still doing real searches and so is much more expensive to run.

[HellzStormer]

> You may have noticed that Google Search, Bing, etc. don't require login or captcha to do a search.

Are you saying you want adds in GitHub search's results? Google, Bing, etc. make money showing you adds. Adding barriers of entry is much less in their interest. Their budget to optimize the search engine is likely much bigger than GitHub's one.

[kelnos]

The entire point of Google Search is to take in everyone, serve ads, and drive people to use other Google properties. Every user that has to jump through hoops in order to access Google Search is a net loss for them.

GitHub doesn't really care all that much if random anonymous users can use their search. Anon users can view source trees, wikis, etc. and check out code, which is more than enough for most people.

> Do you think it was due to DDOS attacks, or do you think it was a power-play to attract more sign-ups and logins?

I think you and I don't know anything about what's going on there internally. I'm usually quick enough to assume the worst about actions Microsoft (of all companies!) takes, but even former GitHub employees have commented here that the new search system is much more resource-intensive than the old, and bots and scrapers were causing real problems. I choose to believe people who seem credible instead of playing the cynic and assuming everything is done with evil intentions and that everyone is lying to me.

Sure, they could build a big sophisticated system to figure out who to serve CAPTCHAs to, or who to outright ban, but why spend the time and money on that when they can just require a login, and the people they care about won't really care.

And sure, this move very well might drive some new signups. Maybe that's a net win for them. So what?

[winkelmann]

The new GitHub search has some more advanced features than Google, Bing, etc. do, such as Regex: https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/github-code-search/...

Of course, they could have kept the old search (without advanced filters) open, but there is at least a sensible explanation why the new search requires being signed in.