Digg may have 19 million unique visitors and nearly 85 million pageviews (Comscore worldwide, Feb ‘09), but one thing it’s never had is a decent search engine. There’s no rhyme or reason to the ordering of results. A lot of stuff just seems to disappear. And the filters are overly complicated.
That’ll change in the near future, the company noted in a blog post today. And since we’re so curious about what the new Digg search will look like, we hammered them until they gave up a screenshot.
The new search appears to have much more relevant results, taking into account the popularity of the story as well as the newness for “best match.” Other simple filters include “most dugg” and “newest first.” Compare that to the very old, not very relevant results you get now.
The new search also has a left sidebar with key stats, such as aging, how many stories with a certain number of Diggs, stories broken out by media type (news, video, images), and by topic.
Dont know why Kevin Rose ignores Digg so much…. He had a cash cow in his hands while it was up and coming and he just left it to start Pownce and now the Twitter directory… Dude could have turned it into something great.
Uh, he doesn’t ignore it. And it is something great (and it is still growing).
Digg is his 9-5 job and a new Diggnation episode is released weekly which is a big promotion tool for Digg.
Pownce was mainly handled by other people, and wefollow is mostly automated and is more of a side project.
Yeah Kevin still remains very active in the day to day architecture of the site. I’m sure he is still the idea generator for lots of the stuff we’re seeing.
he still monitors it but it’s true that he’s a bit more concerned with promotion then pushing out features.
@Television Spy – He may not directly code new features, but if you watch the Digg Townhall videos you’ll see that he’s still overseeing the developent of new features.
Come on, just today there’s been the launch of the DiggBar and new search is coming. Features are coming, most people are just impatient or unsure of what they want.
Does he actually code anything? He hired a coder to create the original digg
because he cant code
OMG this is beautiful!
Thanks for digging this out. Wonder how people will use it. Could become similarly powerful as twitter search. Almost real time news trends … Designing it as a key feature for research instead of a simple utility might be key.
It’s about time, Rose kind of blows at helping things along at Digg. He should have had this done years ago.
Apparently its cool to hate Kevin Rose
Nice, but I guess Digg is too late in this game. The best real-time web page search engine so far I’ve seen is http://www.boilingpage.com that tracks hot pages in Twitter and their search results are more relevant and hot among people. I did a sample search for ‘techcrunch’ and here’s the results in Boilingpage .. http://www.boil...ch&sortby=2
Compare this with Digg search result shown in the screenshot, you can see the difference. Digg gotta do more homework to catch up with Boilingpage, in my opinion.
Pretty good website. I searched for ‘Mike Arrington’ and here are the results. http://www.boil...=Mike+arrington
Very interesting, check out the second result .. haha
I am gonna be big fan of Boilingpage ..
That is a cool search engine. It does really give some good results. I like the tweets option, it does give it a different dimension.
Thanks for sharing
Kevin rose eats puppies
http://macmaniapodcast.com
Googling “keywords site:digg.com” always works out well for me.
it doesn’t matter because DIGG is a fad that missed their window and will eventually die off.
I find myself not going to DIGG as often a year ago. The new search feature should make it more relevant.
people still use digg? whats up with techcrunch and the crazy addiction to digg. its dead man let it go
I still use Digg, and it only seems to be growing in popularity.
Why do people hate on things once they become popular? It’s ridiculous.
Because the people who used it before it became popular don’t like the mainstream content on it after it became popular. Digg used to be all about hacking. Now, the most technological thing you’ll find is how to skin Wordpress.
Hate to say it but I agree with Aniruddha. DIGG is long over.
It is funny how such a fundamental concept (search), can take so many iterations to get right. People expect search to just work and be awesome (because of sites like google), however it is a pretty difficult problem to get right. Glad to see that Digg is taking strides is the right direction here.
Sweet stuff! Sup with all the haters? geesh
I agree search ahs always been weird. Great to see because theres so much fun stuff on digg and I want to find it!
I like Digg, always has something interesting / stupid to browse through.
This could be why search is so neglected, many people browse rather than search?
It’s about time. Not sure why Digg has so much staff when they drag their heels so much on any updates at all.
FTR-The Digg hate has zero to do with it being popular. The list is way too long for a comment thread though. Might be a good idea for a blog post tomorrow though.
my friend count on DIGG is messed up too. The numbers keep changing everytime
Daaamn, between this and the digg bar I might have to go back after a long hiatus spending time in Reddit country.
For anyone wondering what powers such nice Digg search results, I believe they are using Solr – http://lucene.apache.org/solr !
Nice post! Check out my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
I was listening to digg the other day and Kevin Rose was insisting on the importance of launching early and often. I almost spit milk out my nose.
I was like wtf with millions of dollars in venture cap that company has consumed, and how long has it taken them to launch a decent search?
Don’t even get me started on how long the comment system was fucked up. YEARS!