Update: Digg shared some more details about how its search feature (relaunched earlier this year) works. Sammy on the company blog says:
” We’re using Apache SOLR/Lucene which helped us scale horizontally and solved many of our relevancy issues as well as enabling discovery of new content through facets. Beyond site search, the rich set of features has allowed us build a platform that enables other features such as Related By Source and Related By Keywords.”
He also points to a podcast discussing it.
Original Article: Just as Digg was launching the controversial DiggBar, Kevin Rose also announced that the company was readying an improved search feature. We even saw an early screenshot of it about a week ago.
Today, also coinciding with an update about the DiggBar, a post on Digg the Blog is announcing the launch of Digg’s new search. Daniel Burka runs down the following new features:
– cut your results by factors like Digg count, topic, time, etc. – This gives you a lot more info about your query and enables you to drill down to your result much more effectively he says.
– Advanced shortcuts – Add +p to your query for only promoted stories, +u for upcoming stories, and +b for buried.
– Common search tricks now work – like putting your query in quotes for exact match or adding a negative sign before terms to remove it from your results
– A graph showing the relative number of search results by month for the past several years for particular queries
– More effective searching of stories from specific domains – domain filter
– More useful RSS feeds – “We’ve always had RSS feeds for searches, but with the new faceting capabilities, this becomes a lot more effective,” says Burka. “You could create a feed that gives you stories with over 1000 Diggs about X and Y but never when keyword Z appears.”
– Search is now faster
Digg’s search has always gotten a lot of knocks, and improvements have been long awaited. It’ll be interesting to see how users react to the new changes.
Daniel Burka also notes that the new search will serve as a foundation for future projects. I wonder what that will entail.
