GitHub is used worldwide by millions and millions of daily users, hosting the largest set of open source code repositories on the planet. It’s a vital resource not only for open source app developers who want to host their code but for programmers everywhere who want to find real-world examples to help them in their own work.

GitHub is on a mission to make this easier and has unveiled its new search preview showing work so far. The new code search preview covers over five million of the most popular public repositories, as well as any private repositories users themselves have access to.

The search preview allows users to easily find what they are looking for with smart ranking and an index optimised for code. You can search for an exact string of code or use regular expressions. Substrings and special characters are supported. Searches can be scoped with org: or repo: qualifiers, with auto-completion suggestions popping up. Other features include a directory tree view, symbol information, jump-to-definition, select-to-search, and more.

These improvements follow the release of Copilot and Codespaces, continuing to demonstrate GitHub’s ongoing commitment to improving the developer experience.

Initially, the new interface is available separately from the existing search while GitHub continues work on it before it is integrated into the main product.

Ultimately the index will cover every repository that people can access on GitHub.

You can sign up for the preview here and see it in action (video below).