@AnLog thanks for choosing GitLab and for taking the time to share such detailed and helpful feedback! I’m a Product Manager at GitLab, and your input is much appreciated.
Search and discovery is a priority. Lot’s of the open source projects I use in my own projects are hosted on GitHub, and I regularly find myself using their global search to discover new libraries, or see how other people are using them or mocking them out in their unit tests.
Right now we’re working on enabling Elasticsearch on GitLab.com https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/153 which is preventing us from offering global code search on GitLab.com, but as you point out there are a lot of other discovery and search tasks that aren’t source code related.
I’ve created an epic https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1283 and quite a few issues based on your feedback for some of the filtering capabilities you highlighted, and I’ve also created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/61524 to coordinate discovery and planning about how to remove the duplicate places for find projects.
As we continue to make progress on Elasticsearch you can expect to see some discussion on those epics and issues as we work out which ones to look at first, how they would work and when we can buikd them. Your feedback on any of those issues or epics would be very welcome, as would any new issues for anything we might miss!
I’ve also shared your feedback with one of our other Product Managers, Jeremy, who should be able to respond to some of your other feedback too 