Response from Martin Woodward, GitHub's VP of Developer Relations:

Sorry for the inconvenience @koepnick - while searching across all repos has required being logged in for a long time, when we enhanced the search capabilities earlier in the 2023 we had to extend this to repos as well (see https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/).

This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.

other discussions
 

Edit:

Since theres been some confusion with dates

In 2016 github made site side searching login only and hid the search bar if you werent logged in. This didnt include searching within a repository so that could still be done, just not all repositories

This year was the change being referred to in this link which made repository level searching require logging in

Blog post: https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/