From launching the technology preview of the new and improved code search experience a year ago, to the public beta released at GitHub Universe last November, there’s been a flurry of innovation and dramatic changes to some of the core GitHub product experiences around how developers find, read, and navigate code.
How does it work?
The short answer is that we built our own search engine from scratch, in Rust, specifically for the domain of code search. We call this search engine Blackbird.
…We haven’t had a lot of luck using general text search products to power code search. The user experience is poor, indexing is slow, and it’s expensive to host. There are some newer, code-specific open source projects out there, but they definitely don’t work at GitHub’s scale.
Read GitHub’s methodology in the post here.