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Github search does many, many things you can't trivially recreate through a Google search:

You can access all of this functionality with ghrabber.

One of my suggestions to Github is that they disable indexing of dotfiles of all persuasions (including contents of dot-directories), unless the repo owner explicitly opts in. That would make it much harder to find a very large fraction of the more obvious leaks.

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Which of those functions do you feel would allow you to find vulnerabilities quicker?

Nearly all of them, depending on what exactly you're looking for. Simple things like being able to exclude results from forked repos can save a huge amount of time, and being able to limit results by language, creation date and even number of stars (to find personal repos) has come in useful.

I've heard tell that there are people out there who make use of GH's activity feeds to scrape just about every action that's taken on all GH repos.

If true, doesn't this make crippling the usefulness of GH's search really superfluous?

Full disclosure: I'm never a fan of crippling search to cover the ass of someone who has pushed sensitive information to a publicly accessible location. I'm still sore about Google's decision to do things like prevent one from searching for -for instance- credit card numbers. :(

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