You Don’t Know Search: Helping Users Find Code by Automatically Evaluating Alternative Queries

Tens of thousands of engineers use Sourcegraph day-to-day to search for code and rely on it to make progress on software development tasks. We face a key challenge in designing a query language that accommodates the needs of a broad spectrum of users. Our experience shows that users express different and often contradictory preferences for how queries should be interpreted. These preferences stem from users with differing usage contexts, technical experience, and implicit expectations from using prior tools. At the same time, designing a code search query language poses unique challenges because it intersects traditional search engines and full-fledged programming languages. For example, code search queries adopt certain syntactic conventions in the interest of simplicity and terseness but invariably risk encoding implicit semantics that are ambiguous at face-value (a single space in a query could mean three or more semantically different things depending on surrounding terms). Users often need to disambiguate intent with additional syntax so that a query expresses what they actually want to search. This need to disambiguate is one of the primary frustrations we’ve seen users experience with writing search queries in the last three years. We share our observations that lead us to a fresh perspective where code search behavior can straddle seemingly ambiguous queries. We develop Automated Query Evaluation (AQE), a new technique that automatically generates and adaptively runs alternative query interpretations in frustration-prone conditions. We evaluate AQE with an A/B test across more than 10,000 unique users on our publicly-available code search instance. Our main result shows that relative to the control group, users are on average 22% more likely to click on a search result at all on any given day when AQE is active. We share our technique, learnings, and implementation that made it possible for a substantial number of users to now see and click on results that they would not have seen otherwise.