For fun, I had put together a GitHub bot for this purpose a while ago. It indexes all existing issues in a repo, creates embeddings and stores them in a vector DB. When a new issue is created, the bot comments with the 3 most similar, existing issues, from vector similarity.
In theory, that empowers users to close their own issues without maintainer intervention, provided an existing & solved issue covers their use case. In practice, the project never made it past PoC.
The mechanism works okay, but I've found available (cheap) embedding models to not be powerful enough. For GitHub, technology-wise, it should be easy to implement though.
Not open source right now but if people are interested I could clean up the code.
[Closed; Locked: not constructive; Duplicate of: #1701, #74656]
Users will fight such things for a simple reason: every larger OSS project has tons of open[0] issues that look like duplicates, and perhaps even are duplicates, but no one can tell because they're all ~forever old and unresolved, so new people keep adding them again to bring attention to them.
Perhaps Github should start sorting issues by "Last updated" instead of the issue number - then some of the duplicate reports would just turn into "+1"s and "bump!"s on the existing issues.
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[0] - Or closed by stale bot, which is effectively still open, but with an insult on top.
Ive often wondered why GitHub hasn’t introduced this feature because it feels like a really obvious thing to introduce and something that would add an immense amount of value to a lot of projects.
Why not? Companies love to boast about MAUs and similar metrics (even if completely bogus), it has good effect on stock prices.
Most companies don't use GitHub's issue management system they use issue management tools such as JIRA, Trello, etc. Issue management, project management, CI/Actions, wiki, discussions, etc are all nice to haves and are probably more aimed at the open source projects that are used as a marketing tool.
You can easily disable issues.
So I wrote a simple app for fun to navigate and search GitHub issues like emails and even reply
Screen recoding https://x.com/justruky/status/1878507719520387347
But you’re completely right, GH search is truly bad