GitHub introduces ‘Topics’ to let users explore projects by type, technology, & more

Four months after launching a proprietary project management tool for tracking requests, issues, and notes for repositories, GitHub, has launched 'Topics' to let users "discover networks of similar repositories in a completely new way."

Web-based version control repository and a project hosting platform, GitHub introduced new features to help developers find project repositories similar to the one they’re looking for. This feature will classify the repositories based on common subjects, related to the project and topics that interests a user.

Powered by labels, Topics search tool helps to draw connections between GitHub repositories, letting users search by technology, project type, language, community, and other subjects as defined by the repository admin.

GitHub has used machine technology and natural language processing for its latest feature, which first analyses and then suggests topics to the users. The admin can reject or accept a topic based on his/her preferences. The company also noted that Topics can be applied to both public and private repositories, however, private repositories will only display if a user has permission to access them.

Topics also allow admins to add tags to repositories’ main pages, which will be displayed at the bottom of the description of a project. Moreover, adding topics to repositories will also help other developers to discover your projects.

Shay Frendt, a senior engineer at GitHub wrote in a blog post, "We’re at the start of this new journey and rejecting suggestions that don’t fit well will help us train our model for more meaningful results.Topics will continue to grow as we learn more from you and better understand GitHub’s role in project discovery. We can’t wait to see how you use this new feature."

Recently, GitHub raised around $350 million in VC funding.