Add search syntax tip for whole word searches

[nbenitez]

Whole word searches are very useful in situations when a normal search gives two many false positives. Let's document how to do that in Github code search, so people don't have to look that up in regext tutorials.

Why:

Because some times when receiving too many false positives matches, using whole word matching is a popular and effective way to narrow results down to your sought target.

What's being changed (if available, include any code snippets, screenshots, or gifs):

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[github-actions]

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The table contains an overview of files in the content directory that have been changed in this pull request. It's provided to make it easy to review your changes on the staging site. Please note that changes to the data directory will not show up in this table.

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Source	Preview	Production	What Changed
search-github/github-code-search/understanding-github-code-search-syntax.md	fpt ghec	fpt ghec

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fpt: Free, Pro, Team
ghec: GitHub Enterprise Cloud
ghes: GitHub Enterprise Server

[nguyenalex836]

@nbenitez Thanks so much for opening a PR! I'll get this triaged for review ✨

[subatoi]

Hi @nbenitez and thanks for your submission 👋

However, I'm afraid we won't be accepting this on this occasion: I'm not convinced about the particular benefit this new section would have, as we already describe the use of regular expressions in the same article.

Many thanks for your interest in the GitHub Docs and please feel free to take a look at our issues marked help wanted!

[nbenitez]

Much like case sensitiveness, Whole word is a search feature present in most search dialogs (eg. try Adobe Reader, Firefox, etc..) for a reason, because it is both useful and used commonly to limit false positives.

Try eg. search for the matio library inside Flathub organization -> org:flathub matio Github will crash for too many results, then try with case sensitiveness activated -> org:flathub /(?-i)matio/ will not crash but show and an error box with message Results are incomplete due to an internal timeout, consider retrying or refining your query. This is caused by the word information containing matio and information appears in a lot of places including every code license.

So the solution is to use Whole Word -> org:flathub /(?-i)\bmatio\b/

And it is not a coincidence that most search dialogs include that option instead of having the user to learn regex to use that.

[subatoi]

I understand your points; however, in this repo we're only able to help with issues in the context of the documentation, not the product(s) themselves. In this case, I'd recommend opening a discussion in community to provide your feedback: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions

Thank you again!