Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by darkamaul 195 days ago
GitHub Code Search has too many quirks compared to the zoekt powered alternatives (cs.android.com, cs.bazel.build) which feel far more intuitive.

I wish Microsoft would invest more in improving it - especially since Sourcegraph can't search private repositories, leaving GitHub's tool as the only real option for many codebases.
1 comments
Scaevolus 195 days ago
None of Google's public source search engines (android, chromium, bazel) use Zoekt. They use Google's web indexing technology adapted for trigrams, which was mostly developed to support their massive internal monorepo, but exposed for a few of their major open source projects too.

You can index private repos with Sourcegraph, but it's a paid feature ($19/mo/user+).

link
sluongng 195 days ago
> They use Google's web indexing technology adapted for trigrams, which was mostly developed to support their massive internal monorepo

Do you have a source for this? I would love to read more about it.

In the doc of the Zoekt repo, it says

> What does cs.bazel.build run on?

> Currently, it runs on a single Google Cloud VM with 16 vCPUs, 60G RAM and an attached physical SSD.

https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/blob/main/doc/faq.md#wh...

so at least they were using Zoekt up until a certain point in the past.

link
Scaevolus 195 days ago
Oops, I guess that one is small enough to use Zoekt. Note how different the interface is than Android and Chromium's code search.
link