[sdesol]

For GitHub, I would have to imagine only being able to search public repos with regexp would be good enough. GitHub has many strategies, but the main one is, they want to maintain, if not, expand their open source mind share.

The more reasons you give people to go to GitHub, the better off they will be in the future. So I do agree with you that as a commercial solution, this may not be viable, but for GitHub's public repos, this can turn into a very positive thing.

[marceloabsousa]

That might well be true but to scale this type of service to all public repos with decent latency and update ratio is a major technical challenge and likely very costly to maintain.

[sdesol]

This is my personal observation, but GitHub appears to be a much more ambitious company, now that they are part of Microsoft. With a CEO that understands both the open source and the enterprise world and with Microsoft cash at hand, I don't think spending money to make search better would cause any concerns.

Doing technical things that GitLab, Bitbucket, etc. can't is quite valuable. It also helps with recruiting, since smart people want to work on difficult problems.

It may well be costly to maintain, but I think the operating cost would be well within the realm of an incumbent that wants to maintain and expand their reach. I've been studying the code hosting space for quite sometime and GitHub, from an outsiders perspective, appears to be much more focused and ambitious, which should cause serious concerns for GitLab.