What is Digg?31 Comments
- itzfritz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15OK, I am seriously retarded.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8heh, it "feeds" on del.icio.us
- sockpuppets, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Designed by Mark Zeman.
Submitted by zeman.
You ze-man!
I'd build my own but I couldn't afford the alcohol bills. - bitcloud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I've been looking for a way to automate the time i spend on digg...
- Dotcommer, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Man this is annoying. I just tried it out. Its clunky, has poor visuals, one of the most ANNOYING ***** sounds ive ever heard when you drop a floppy disk in it (btw, wtf is a robot using a god damn floppy for. Its 2006 people COME ON.), and the whole "im a virtual pet, feed me take care of me!" ***** is old as hell. Its like.. neopets but for online searching or something. When I went to this I was hoping for more of something that would scour the web for you and help you out with finding cool stuff, without stupid gimmicks and frills, maybe something more closely related to lets say, SmarterChild on AIM or something.
But this... man... I can't get used to this. - zeman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Searchbots do feed on Digg. We watch the RSS feeds and unofficial API and then suck any popular websites into Searchbots, we then do a look up on the url in Del.icio.us for popular tags added to each url. You won't find anything from today on Digg within Searchbots because we have a 400 popular post delay to give people time to tag a new website in Del.icio.us. Then when you setup a daily or weekly report your Searchbots will scan through all the popular websites and suggest the best ones to look at. It also keeps a track of which websites you then go to and filters them out of subsequent reports.
- zeman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Thanks for the feedback. I'd be the first to agree that Searchbots won't be to everyone's liking. I've designed it to be more of a long term relationship that you set up with your Searchbot rather than getting instant and endless Google like results. It's more about just the best websites. Half way between a search engine and a directory. It's the feedback that you give your Searchbot that improves the results over time.
As part of my Masters in Design I'm looking at game theory and how it can be used to motivate people to contribute content. That's where the idea of a personified search robot that you have to feed comes from. It's all a big experiment.
Check out the Searchbots Launch video in the Tour section for more background on the theory and history behind Searchbots.
Fair call on the sounds. I'll add in an option to turn them off if your Searchbot would rather be mute. - wonderboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@ers35
Nothing wrong with posting your own stuff as long as you don't spam it. - Dotcommer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@ Zeman
Well, it was a good effort, sorry to be so blunt about it. At least you take critcism like a man. - matPolaschek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Well sounds like a great idea to me! The better the searches the better the results and the happier the searcher!
- zeman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Good points. Searchbots was featured on a German website a few weeks back and a lot of German Searchbots were built. Those people then went on to search for things like CSS and then rate the quality of the websites they visited. The websites they thought were best have risen to the top. Things should readjust themselves over time, especially now there's a bunch of new bots built by Digg users.
- matthewaaron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3inaccurate... does not feed on digg... but cool nonetheless.
- Emerica, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4-Bury, wrong place
- gonzo1773, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I digg it.
- inobla, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hey Zeman, a nice feature to add (unless I missed it) would be to pick your preferred language. I tried a simple tag search for something that I know enough about that I could rate to (feed) my bot, "span div html". Almost every result came back in what appears to be German, and only one page looked somewhat relevant. Did it possibly confuse code with content?
I tried to "feed" my bot using key phrases like "not html" on the pages that were obviously about other subjects, but for some reason both single words and phrases aren't adding to the cloud.
Anyway, I'm gonna keep playing with it and try other subjects. I love the concept, and I'm confident that future advancements in AI will really help bot technology become a big player in the search market. - ers35, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@wonderboy
I know, I was just reinforcing what sockpuppets said. - wonderboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Oops, didn't even see that he was the one who pointed it out.
- pfeerick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I second that. Searchbots is an interesting concept. I just hope it doesn't "gobble" up digg & del.icio.us!
- anitab83, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I totally agree. When I need to do a search, I want information fast. I don't want to waste time be warned that my "searchbot" doesn't have a left arm.
- Dotnetsky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Gawrsh! Must be pretty Duggly, I can't even bring it up id da browsa-man.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm sorry, but the results are poor(i received things like beauty websites for dangerously long nails, after putting in seo and search engines?) - and it's not crawling in real time as far as a i can tell - simply selecting results from a master database.
- zeman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1my fault, I added in some code that skewed the results. give it another spin.
- everlaster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i tried it and the results are just far from being what I expected them to be.
- yauhin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Whoa... one of the results was "superxxcumshot"... >.<
- WMD404, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0How is step 4 supposed to work? I had 5 words punched in and it said 'you must enter at least 3 words.' Whatever! Seems like this could be accomplished without such drag-and-drop cutesiness.
- miloverb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0its like the web's best friend. Only robotic...wait.......
- cazzamaru, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I totally dig dat idea :P
- ers35, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2http://digg.com/userimages/z/e/m/zeman/large2201.png
- timjbart, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2You're killjoys aren't you...you don't like it? Make something better
- Dotcommer, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1weird... double post. dissregard this comment.
- itzfritz, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1aren't bots against the digg TOS?
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