Read the second half of his comment and ask what percentage of the Linux kernel source would be excluded by file type rules versus other projects. I mostly work on web and data archival projects and ripgrep is noticeably seconds (or more!) faster because it can skip images, archives, etc.

If you’re talking about the core algorithm, it’s not that much faster but the clever adjustments for common patterns and modern CPU architectures also counts for real world results. It’s just important to be precise so people know there hasn’t been some fundamental breakthrough in searching.