GitHub has recently unveiled their huge code search makeover, giving developers the ability to navigate more quickly and uncover more accurate and relevant results. After the early preview phase in 2021, the general availability of the redesigned code search was officially announced. In addition to the updated interface, many of the processes taking place in the background have been completely re-thought to make the search faster and more intuitive.
The search engine itself, known as Blackbird, has been built in Rust and is designed to whittle down the huge 115TBof content to only 28TB of unique material. This means that the new code search should be able to provide results approximately twice as fast as before. Not only that, but the engine hopes to understand coding more effectively too, allowing users to find more precise results when sourcing for information.
GitHub software engineer, Colin Merkel, spoke about this project stating that the goal is for developers to “quickly find critical information scattered across their codebase, put that information into context, and ultimately make them more productive”. To aid in this mission, alongside the new code search, GitHub has created a search syntax guide which will help educate users on how to use keywords, operators and more to get the desired information.
GitHub is an extensive developer platform that features over 100 million repositories of open source code. It is particularly known for its version control system, Git, and has been released a range of AI-based products, with the latest being Copilot X. This GPT-4 powered feature is designed to help developers quickly code, correct, and compose code more rapidly.
Colin Merkel is the software engineer behind this new search engine for GitHub. He had the idea for the code search several years ago and has worked diligently to have it become available for general use. His passion for coding is evident in his work and with the help of his team, they have created a comprehensive search tool that looks set to make the lives of developers simpler.
