I use gists all day every day: it's where I dump and share pieces of reusable code. It's always been a huge pain to search for something you know you gisted, but can no longer find without browsing through 20 pages of 3-line excerpts. Search makes this a million times better.
The new code editor is also pretty sweet!
--- Somewhat OT:
I find that github has always had poor to okay search capabilities.
For example, have you ever tried to search for a repo name, only to find 1000 forks? wat. Ever tried to search issues for a specific issue, only to find no results, removing a word or two to get a less accurate search.
Search for me is about discoverability. And github is for developers for the most part.
As a developer I want discoverability for code! I want regex features (like in google code search), better matches. Ways to compress my search results down. Search tags code:'if Awesome()'.
I just feel they could be doing so much better in this area.
* it is (surprisingly?) case sensitive * it only searches titles, not file contents * the UI feels disconnected from the main gist area, making it unclear whether its a search of all Gists (like the previous version) or a personal search.
Fortunately, this update indicates they're paying attention to a much-used part of their product that was starting to feel neglected. At their pace of improvement I can't see these holes remaining for too long.
Now, hope they add back the ability to be notified when there's a comment on your gist (which Gisted supports)!