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.
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.
TBF going by load times, GitHub search was perpetually on the brink of collapse since well before the Microsoft acquisition. I daren’t imagine what the indexes look like.
Its* own users.