Semantic Code Search

Earlier discussion on same topic (different URL):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017656

Not impressed with the results. Here's what I tried:

"md5 hash": It looks like we don't have great results for that search.

"create a thread": a bunch of things with "create" in their name, but nothing related to threads.

"find largest file: It looks like we don't have great results for that search.

"execute shell command": some Kubernetes stuff?

"matrix determinant": machine learning stuff

"create a pie chart": something to do with creating vertices

This is amazing. Not even their own examples work. I tried "blocks until the server has shut down", which they suggested, and it gave me 3 results, none of which were code blocking until the server shut down.

I'm surprised they are showcasing a feature that works this poorly and I'm not looking forward to having github search return results that are even less relevant to my query than they are now.

I can think of 10 features, off the top of my head, to add to github search that would make it unambiguously better, none of them is training a deep learning neural network to find things when I'm not sure what I'm looking for.

How about implementing ctags/cscope? How about when I click on a result opening it in a new window by default? How about highlighting all the matches when I open a file?

And that's not even getting into parts of github that actually matter, like the PR review interface.