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I use github-wide searches all the time to see how people are using certain APIs, to find libraries used in some blob from the strings I find there, to find people working with the same data I'm about to attempt to work it, and the list goes on.

What you use github search for doesn't require all this engineering, but what I use it for does. Why wouldn't they build something that satisfies both our necessities well?

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Same. I'll go even further and say that the narrower the search the less useful it is, as if I want to search a single repository I can and will just download it as local grep is so much better than remote grep it is painful. They could make a really amazing remote search for a repository--with a find-as-you-type low-latency display that supported language-specific syntax tree queries--but it would require way too many resources and so they are never going to bother. The result: if I am searching on GitHub at all, it is probably a full-site query, and I absolutely do use full-organization searches to figure out what repository to download as so many people now do extremely fine-grained linked repositories (though, in my experience, GitHub's search for this purpose sucks... maybe it is better now).

Same here. I find doing a quick org-wide code search for a specific call a great starting point for impact analysis for API changes. Using it multiple times a week!

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