GitHub is a home for a lot of repositories. To make it more fun to fiddle with, it has introduced a new feature to help users in finding similar project based around common subject areas. With it, users can scout the platform by classifying repositories they might be interested in.
It's called the Topics feature, and it's basically a search tool powered by labels that connect between repositories. It allows users to search form projects by technology, project-type, language, community, and other subjects as defined by the repository admin.
As it allows better discovery, it can be a useful feature for those seeking to explore subjects areas that they're interested in and can contribute to.
Topics' labels are displayed on repositories' main pages below the description of each project. Repository admins can use as many labels as they like. And what's more, Topics uses machine learning to figure out what a repository is about, enabling a quick label suggestions that it thinks are worth adding.
The feature is not available for private repositories as they aren't analyzed this way. But admins can still add their own Topics manually to enable their repositories to be shown on search results, seen by others.
Topics is a new way for discovery network by GitHub. Topics that are shown as labels, acts like tags that create subject-based connections between different repositories. This way, users can explore projects that have a something in common.
"Topics will continue to grow as we learn more from you and better understand GitHub's role in project discovery," explained Shay Frendt, a senior engineer at GitHub, in a blog post on February 1, 2017.
GitHub launches Topics after it launched a new proprietary project-management tool for tracking pull requests, issues, and notes for repositories.
