Response from Martin Woodward, GitHub’s VP of Developer Relations:

Sorry for the inconvenience @koepnick - while searching across all repos has required being logged in for a long time, when we enhanced the search capabilities earlier in the 2023 we had to extend this to repos as well (see https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/).

This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.

  • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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    11 months ago

    This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.

    So, Azure’s bot protection is crap. Good to know.

    • satan@r.nf
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      11 months ago

      People who haven’t hosted anything bigger than a two digit daily visitors tells Microsoft how bad their bots protection is.

    • detalferous@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Google can accommodate billions of searches globally on pages it doesn’t control

      Microsoft can’t index a tiny fraction of that number, even for it’s own users.

      What a black eye for Microsoft engineering.

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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      11 months ago

      The amount of false positives probably wasn’t worth exposing the feature. Not like they’re going to lose customers over this, people who only access Github without an account are probably a net loss for the company.

      Microsoft could build advanced bot detection tools and what have you, but it’s much cheaper to just disable the feature and let people click the login button once every month or so.