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108 Comments
- strikerK, on 10/12/2007, -1/+200as much as i love digg, the search that is has is garbage.
i always use google if i need to find something on here. (site:digg.com) - error792, on 10/12/2007, -1/+83Yeah, digg has horrible search; sometimes searching the EXACT title of an article will return nothing. I find a similar problem with Wikipedia: no spell correction.
So I use Google for mostly all search online. - quakerorts, on 10/12/2007, -1/+41Digg Search is so useless that I don't bother searching for duplicate stories before submitting, anymore. Oddly enough when you click Submit, it does a fairly good job, sometimes, finding previous submissions.
- jstohler, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21Digg has serious infrastructure problems, and this is just one of them.
- hevnsnt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17This is how I search digg
Go to Google and type: (without quotes)
"site:digg.com searchphrase" - GinaJuice, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18Digg search is almost as useful as Windows XP's search...
- munkey, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17I always use google to search digg, the search on here is just way too slow.
- scooter17, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14I find the entire site painfully slow... and its not my connection. Anyone else have trouble scrolling when there are 300+ comments?
- EeyoreTKC, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11It's almost as if google specialized in search...
- Sabin, on 10/12/2007, -5/+16I hope you die in a fire.
- Pharoah6905, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11http://www.google.com/coop/profile?user=017771777217723414381
just click subscribe and "most" of the time it will come up with the result at the top and highlighted (kind of like the suggested sites) its even easier than always typing in "site:www.digg.com + whatever" - masamunecyrus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10I can personally say that I have, on MULTIPLE occasions, searched for a story before I submitted it and found nothing, and then when I go to submit it the dupe-detector finds several stories -- several hour old stories -- that match mine. How can this happen? I have no idea.
- tomboy501, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I agree. Auto-dupe is far better (and faster) at catching dupes than trying to do the proper thing and search first. Even then, it doesn't catch everything.
Also, it almost seems the staff is discouraging actual searching before submitting with the new upgrade. You can't submit a story from the search results page anymore. I don't remember it being like that before. Now it's a hassle...clicking and waiting for pages to load. They aren't making it any easier for us to be proactive about keeping duping down. - m3mn0n, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Am I the only one that thinks Digg should stop their boycott of tags and allow submitters to add tags and maybe even allow us to add custom tags for our own dugg story collection?
I think that might help, just look at how effective delicious is with searching and they're a damn popular, too.
I think tags would give better search results and then even allow us to do some organization of our diggs because right now, there simply isn't any (not even sorting by category) which makes Digg suck for article/link retrieval. And the crappy search doesn't help either.
Google to the rescue but that's just covering up the problem, not really tackling it head-on. - mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Search_Engine_3
(hilarious) - TheCount, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7lol, digg doesn't have horrible search, there's a lot of content here. Goggle is just... well, it's Google. Compared to Google, the horsepower behind digg is like a candle compared to the sun.
- jakejarvis, on 10/12/2007, -17/+23"Digg is experiencing a high volume of traffic right now. Please try your search again later."
You would have found it through Digg if you had refreshed that page. A "high volume of traffic" doesn't mean that there were no results found. - JeremyL, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6What do you expect. Digg is the slowest damn site on the net.
- brundlefly76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I pointed this out in a comment months ago.
The problem is very common for anyone who has developed high-scale search engines.
The issue is that an RDBMS (im guessing digg uses MySQL) doesnt scale well for a search engine (at what point is completely variable based on dataset, traffic, query complexity, and delay budget). This is why it often fails with 'too busy' - the rdbms either has run out of connections or the query is timing out.
The alternative, which sites like Google and Yahoo! use, uses pre-built result HTML snippets indexed on a high-performance filesystem. The result is that when you do a search, you arent doing a traditional query, but instead are pretty much telling the search engine exactly where the pre-built results for your answer set lie on the filesystem. As a result, serving a search engine result scales about as well as an HTML URI request.
Why doesnt digg have this feature? Well, probably the same reason most sites don't - it is extremely complicated and resource-intensive to develop and maintain these systems, and they almost always need to be coded from scratch to match the specific requirements. - m3mn0n, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Not the slowest, but the comments page has massive usability issues and it's SLOW AS HELL for me.
The search is rather slow and crappy, but the rest of the site is fine. - xpose, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4If you guys listened to Kevin Rose's most recent speech, he talks about how crappy the search is. So this shouldnt surprise anyone and the Digg team is well aware.
- centic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4As opposed to splitting revenue, or "striking a deal" wouldn't it make more sense for digg to just submit search to google.com and add on site:digg.com to the front of the query?
Not to mention, google lets you have custom search pages too. - grizly, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3yes no wonder they win, google has 99999999999 more servers than digg. you get my point.
- shoover, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@kp3469 If you read the blog, you'd realize his sample size was bigger than 1. He just spared us the monotony of reading through the other examples.
- jstohler, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Clearly more resources are allocated to the pre-submit search than to general ones.
- strabes, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Almost but not quite. XP's search is pretty hard to beat.
- MrBabyMan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm actually shocked it didn't get assassinated by the "bury brigade".
- hiscity, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3For a nice way to limit your search by month,
Just put this type of string in the google search box.
for one month.... site:digg.com date: 1
for six months.... site:digg.com date: 6
enjoy! - m3mn0n, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5How dare you turn your back on thy holy Google search.
- brundlefly76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I wouldn't say that - for the site, digg does extremely well. Keep in mind that digg crashes websites, and that in order to crash them, every user that participated in the crash of each website had to hit digg *first*. Search engine needs help though.
- rubicante, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Digg could just outsource this to Google. Problem solved.
- MeltedUFO, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2too much javascript on comments page
I dont really need the minimize effect - bpapa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2brundle more or less hit the nail on the head.
From my own experience working in industry I know that it's not smart to expect a really fast or reliable search from a website. If you're comparing to Google, it's like comparing Michael Jordan balling to some dude at a random pick-up game. Search is a hard problem to solve, and you have to prioritize things. Having a performant site with a lot of cool features centered around data is a higher priority at Digg then having a AAA search engine, and rightly so. - Ragnar0k, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Digg: Load issues, not always available, slow, but every story
Google: Fast, extensive syntax options, spiders may not have indexed everything you need.
So, generally google first, if that fails, Digg, just in case the google-spiders are running late.
``Ragnarok - RMoore08, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2that would be a good comment if digg was a search engine.....
- kablammo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Maybe I've missed the boat on a few stories, but this is the first article I've seen on here to generate (so far) almost entirely negative comments (creative criticism) about Digg.
- RMoore08, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2After Kevin Rose's Future of Web Apps speech, he was asked if the search capabilities of digg.com would be expanded Kevin immediately said, "Yeah....Our search sucks". Applause shortly followed.
- beers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2understandable that google has more power to bring up search results. that kind of thing is their bag.
maybe digg is looking at a google appliance:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/
don't know if or how it would integrate into digg.com.
I think if a google appliance had 50000 recent digg.com docs it would probably be a good start. on the other hand, "640kb should be enough for everyone". - RMoore08, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@OBKenobi I doubt Kevin would sell it to google.. and yes.. you can have google search for your site for free anyways.
- PRlME, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2i never knew that (site:digg.com) thing -=
- PSPon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Someone needs to make a firefox extension that automatically opens a tab to google if you search anything on digg
- hiscity, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sorry! I was wrong. Hafta debug....
- DutchMaster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1digg sucks when it comes to searching, you can never find what your looking for and it takes 5hrs to do so
- hiscity, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ok, got it!!!
Here's a search string that you can paste into a windows shortcut or a "new bookmark" on the command line in firefox that gives a google search box set to a 3 month limit.
http://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Adigg.com&as_qdr=m3
You can default it to 3, 6, or 12 months.
http://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Adigg.com&as_qdr=m6
This one works!!! - GaffleSnipe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah, I didn't try it before i commented. Let us know if you figure it out!
- sint4x, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1lol, either that is really obvious or we are all tools (and by we I mean everyone that uses the internet)
- Auzimov16, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I love digg, but the search engine is crap.
Sorry guys. - hiscity, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Although I'd like to figure it out I hit a wall.
The basic reference with the date: tag is here http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html
But even without the site: tag.... it doesn't appear to work. Google help error?!
That might be worth an article by itself. - allholy1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I created a script to fix this...
http://digg.com/mods/Greasemonkey_script_Fix_the_slow_Digg_search_problem - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I probably used the digg search engine 3 times before i switched to google... I never use digg. But that's not just digg. I am just in the habit of using google now, for all sites. I find myself searching "wiki antfarm" "digg OLED" "webcreme pando" even for my own blog I search "greedo subway." Google is fast. I can't even search my own hard-drive as fast as google.
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