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Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

> Someone said to me, "I couldn't find coverage.py on Github." Right, because it's hosted on Bitbucket.

I was curious, so I went to bitbucket.org to try to find coverage.py. Experience was awkward to say the least:

1) Bitbucket homepage does not have a search bar, nor is there a link from the homepage to the search [1]

2) Guessing that the URL is /search puts you in the team profile for account `search`. finally you see what looks like a search bar at top [2]

3) Searching for coverage.py doesn't show `ned / coverage.py` in the first page! There are lesser-known forks of coverage.py that show up higher than the original project. [3]

I'm sure these will improve over time, but discoverability is still incredibly difficult on bitbucket.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/soRXB98.png [2] http://i.imgur.com/z5YmcL2.png [3] http://i.imgur.com/uhg8rbc.png

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Why not use Google? Searching for 'coverage.py', the bitbucked repository is the fifth link for me. The first and second link are more general informational pages which link to the bitbucket repository. Searching for 'coverage.py source repository' gives the bitbucket repository as the first and second result.

Because Bitbucket's own search ought to have more insight into searching its content (but apparently not).

I think the core complaint, though, is that people's first step should be "search using a general search engine" (whether Google or Bing or Baidu or Yandex, etc.) not "search using GitHub". The complaint and expectation is not "someone should have tried to see if it was explicitly on BitBucket", but "people should not assume that you are using a single service". It is effectively similar to "I tried to find your email address and I couldn't" coming down to "I looked on G+ so I could find your Gmail address, and you don't seem to even have an account". There are tons of alternatives to both GitHub and BitBucket, including "I am hosting my repository on my own domain": having everyone assume "well, the content must be accessible within a specific silo" to the point of not even considering "I should use a general purpose web search engine for this use" is an egregious example of "bad monoculture".

Bitbucket also has awkward URLs, where my fork of someone else repo appears as a subdirectory of their project. I still can't get over the fact that the Bitbucket website won't let (easily) visitors search without creating an account. That's a terrible user experience and I'm sure many potential users or customers just choose the tab and go to GitHub.

I obviously can't speak for Atlassian, but I get the impression they really don't care about not being a popular FREE public code hosting site. They definitely want to be the go to site for FREE private code hosting for very small teams though.

> I get the impression they really don't care about not being a popular FREE public code hosting site.

Well it's more that they accepted reality (git and github had the network effect) and moved on.

Which is frankly ridiculous if true.

The number of programers in the world is going to follow an exponential curve. By 2032 there will be more programmers than all the atoms in all the stars of the known universe.

If you are logged in their is a search bar in the upper right hand corner. It has the same problem as your search thing.

Just do a

    pip home coverage

And the home page for the package will pop up just like `homebrew`

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