GitSearch

My favorite subreddit, r/selfhosted, has my best chance of reaching people who host their own repo sites. A big hope for GitSearch is that it can help people who don't want to host their code on GitLab.com or GitHub get discovered. If I'm going to get submissions for sites that are off the beaten path, this seems like my best shot.

I finally feel like GitSearch was ready for people to poke at, so I posted there this morning. Fingers crossed that it gets some traction.

I put up a very rough prototype on the site and collected some feedback from friends. Lots of encouragement but overall lukewarm reaction as far as stickiness. Going to power through to the MVP to post on Indie Hackers, but was looking for a little more excitement from the first concept reveal.

After searching for a few libraries to help me with another project, App Creator, I realized how many times I've struggled to find what I want via web search, GitHub, etc.

With web search, you often get npm or other package site pages as top results, when I really just want to click through to the repo.

With GitHub search, advanced options are kind of hidden and the site is trying to accommodate a lot of use cases, like searching Issues, Milestones, Users, etc. I just want to search repos.

Then if I also want to search GitLab, I'm either dependent on web search giving me a good result or I have to go to gitlab.com and search there as well. Searching both sites at once seems helpful and simple enough to accomplish.