I am sure you have all probably seen or heard about the new DiggBar, which Digg released last week.
I was attending IM Spring Break in Florida and didn’t have the time to get a full blog post out about it, but I did talk to to Brian Chen, from Wired.com, about the toolbar and what I thought about it.
Initially the response was pretty positive, and it still is for the average user, but for those who understand how search engines work, the new DiggBar is nothing but concern.
One person put up an interesting hack using the DiggBar to show some of its weaknesses.
Of course any submissions to Digg that are not in favor of the new feature, are being removed or buried rather quickly, even though the comments are overall in agreement.
There are a lot of articles out on the DiggBar, so I won’t get too into that release.
However, I did want to mention that Digg has also released a new version of search today… and it is a real improvement.
Digg doesn’t have the greatest reputation for releasing changes that Digg users like, but this new and improved search technology is the second release in a row that users seem to be happy with.
The old search was very basic, providing only a few options to sort and find submissions.
The new search still provides the same basic functions, actually making some aspects harder by requiring you to remember search options like ‘+b’ and ‘+u’ to see buried and upcoming content, but it also adds in quite a few new sorting options as well.
You can now filter results by the number of Diggs they received, by source, and also by Topic.
Advanced search options also include adding the following to your search phrase:
- Add +b to include buried stories
- Add +p show only promoted stories
- Add +np show only not promoted stories
- Add +u show only upcoming stories
- Put terms in “quotes” for an exact search
- Add -term to exclude a term from your query (e.g. apple -iphone)
I guess this is why Digg made the comment that their new search is now ‘99.987% Less Suck.’