Search in GitLab

[Ben Gamari]

Simon Peyton Jones via ghc-devs <ghc-devs at haskell.org> writes:

> Does anyone know how to search better in GitLab.
> Currently I'm using the standard GitLab search.  I'm searching for
> "<<loop>>"
> where I intend the quotes meaning exactly that string as usual in a search term.  But I get lots of results mentioning loop, without the angle brackets.
> Moreover I want to sort the results by date or ticket number, and I can't see how to do that.
> Does Google index our repo?  Can I use Google to search it somehow?

Indeed this is a hard query. It appears that the tokenizer used by
GitLab (or perhaps Elasticsearch, which is responsible for full-text
indexing) considers the angle-brackets to be token delimiters (which I
suppose is fair given that usually you see them used to signify
less-than/greater-than operators).

Google seems to be slightly better, returning only 10 hits. If this
isn't sufficient and the query is important I could run a query against
the database directly if you would like.

Frankly, this makes me wonder whether we should change the output
produced for loops. The current error is essentially un-Googleable, as
we see here. I know I have personally struggled with this same issue in
the past.

Richard, I checked on Google Search Console and it appears to be
indexed on a nearly-daily basis. I'm a bit surprised that you have been
having trouble. Do you have a specific example of a query that you have
been disappointed by in the past?

Cheers,

- Ben

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