Pretty sure they've been in bed for a while. Just needed to tie the knot before beginning the cleanse.
You seriously attribute forks not being searchable normally (which has always been the case) to some long-standing planning with Microsoft, all the while Github was also talking to Google and other buyers? Looks to me more like you went looking for bad things cause you wanted bad things to have happened.
I'm aware some (but not all) forks were not searchable before. Always considered it a bug in their software. In this case, however, I'm referring to is search by repo name. Would you expect forks to appear by repo name in search?