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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

That was a great write up.

If you don't mind me giving you some unsolicited product feedback: I think SemHub didn't do well because it's unclear what problem it's actually solving. Who actually wants your product? What's the use case? I use GitHub issues all the time, and I can't think of a reason I'd want semhub. If I need to find a particular issue on, say, TypeScript, I'll just google "github typescript issue [description]" and pull up the correct thing 9 times out of 10. And that's already a pretty rare percentage of the time I spend on GitHub.

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Thanks for the feedback, to be honest, my own experience is actually very similar to yours.

The original pain point probably only exists for small minority of open source maintainers who manage multiple repos and actually search across them regularly. Most devs are probably like you and I, and the mediocre GitHub search experience is more than compensated by using Google.

In its current iteration, it's quite hard to get regular devs to change their searching behaviour, and, even for those who experience this pain point, it probably isn't large enough for them to change their behavior.

If I continue to work on this, I would want to (1) solve a bigger + more frequent pain point; (2) build something that requires a smaller change in user behavior.

Any chance you live in SF? If so, we should meet up - I'm working on something similar. You can reach out at my username @gmail.com

https://manticoresearch.com/blog/github-semantic-search/ gives some good examples where you get more with semantic than keyword search:

  * Search for "memory leak", get "index out of memory"
  * Search "API rate limits", get “throttling”, “250 results” limit, and “rate limiting”
  * Search issues for "user authentication" to see whether anyone has submitted your feature request
  * Search for “SQL injection” to get “database infiltration” or “SQL vulnerability”

I understand that semantic search gives you more than keyword search. I don't understand the cases when you need that. Like I said, I use GitHub issues all the time, and it's exceedingly rare that I need to search for something extensively like this.

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