I think it works fine for simple searches mentioned in the post, but anything even slightly more advanced doesn't work very well. I also wish there was a way to search in branches other than master
This is actually an insanely hard problem to solve, given current technology. Right now, you can either try to index a little bit of everything, which is what GitHub and others (GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.) are doing. Or you can take the approach that I'm taking, which is make it possible for the user to search any branch they want, but limit the number of repositories they can search in parallel.
GitHub and my approach are definitely targeted at two different use cases. My background is Enterprise, which is why my search solution is based on "search relevance", while GitHub is more focused on "search discovery", which is more suited for finding random things.
It's a workaround to do search in different branches on 1 repo, but works fine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VQVmh0UOnU
What may not be obvious from the video is, indexing additional branches is extremely efficient and fast, since most branches usually share 90 - 99% of the same content.
My indexing technology, also introduces a "group" concept, which makes it possible for you to share indices across similar repos, which makes indexing hundreds of forked repos, quite efficient and fast.
Apparently this is related to how the search index works, but cumbersome nevertheless.
[1] https://help.github.com/articles/searching-code/#considerati...