Boolean Builder
Guide

GitHub X-ray search: find developer profiles with Google

A GitHub X-ray search uses Google to find developers by the languages and tools they show on GitHub. The pattern below returned profiles of people in our test.

The profile pattern

  • The words repositories, followers and following appear on profile pages of people.
  • -site:github.com/orgs removes organization pages. -inurl:orgs did not remove them in our test.
  • -site:gist.github.com removes gists: site:github.com also includes gist.github.com.
  • -inurl:tab, -inurl:blob and -inurl:tree remove code and repository pages.

In our test on 22 October 2026, this search returned 10 profiles of people out of 10 results: site:github.com "seattle" golang "repositories" "followers" "following" -site:github.com/orgs -inurl:tab -inurl:blob -inurl:tree.

Languages and cities

The GitHub fields location:, language: and followers: work only in the search on github.com. In Google they are plain text. Type a language or a city as a plain word or a phrase in quotes, for example golang or "Seattle, WA".

Many GitHub profiles show no job title. Skills and a city find more people than a title.

Old patterns that no longer work

  • "joined on": 3 results and no profiles in our test.
  • inurl:tab=repositories inurl:language: no results in our test.
  • A public email on a profile is now rare.

Limit

The Google limit of 32 words applies. Each -site: and -inurl: operator counts as one word, so the profile pattern uses 9 of the 32 words.

Example

GitHub X-ray

site:github.com "repositories" "followers" "following" -site:github.com/orgs -site:gist.github.com -inurl:tab -inurl:blob -inurl:tree golang (Kubernetes OR gRPC) Seattle "Backend Engineer"

15 of 32 words

Sources

Boolean search guides