How can I find github projects being watched by more people?

Question

How do I find github projects which are being watched / monitored by more people (to put it simply the most popular projects)

Answer 1

Update December 2013

New feature to discover trending projects: "More Explore Features", with "Explore Stars"

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Almost 2 years later, August 2013: "Explore what is Trending on GitHub"

Eight times a day we calculate trending data into three time buckets: daily, weekly, and monthly. You can change the time periods by selecting one from the drop-down.

Filter by languages

You can also filter the trends by language.
By default you will see trending items in any language.

You'll also see "unknown languages" as a filter. Our language library can't always determine the language for the repository, but that won't keep the repository from trending.

Next up, you will see languages that you find interesting based on your top starred repositories.
If you haven't starred any repositories, you'll see trends based on the top languages on GitHub. Of course, we also provide a drop-down for all the rest of the languages.

Languages are always computed based on repositories. When on the repositories tab, you will see repositories with the primary language of the language filter you selected. When looking at the developers tab, you will see developers that have a trending repository in the selected language.

What makes repositories or developers trend?
We look at a variety of data points including stars, forks, commits, follows, and pageviews, weighting them appropriately. It's not just about total numbers, but also how recently the events happened.

Why isn't there more than one page?
We want to surface just the top 25. Any more than that dilutes the effectiveness of trending and takes a lot to compute.

Search Examples!

See jasonrudolph's gists, including "5 entertaining things you can find with the GitHub Search API"

The query "Find the hottest repositories created in the last week" does sort the result by stars:

# We'll use the `date` command to get the date for "7 days ago"
$ date -v-7d '+%Y-%m-%d'
# => 2013-07-15

$ curl -G https://api.github.com/search/repositories       \
    --data-urlencode "q=created:>`date -v-7d '+%Y-%m-%d'`" \
    --data-urlencode "sort=stars"                          \
    --data-urlencode "order=desc"                          \
    -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.preview" |          \
    jq ".items[0,1,2] | {name, description, language, watchers_count, html_url}"

Answer 2

If you go to http://github.com/explore you can view the trending repos by day/week/month etc.

Alternatively for the most watched/forked you can go here http://github.com/popular/watched