Digg

Digg's search engine is powerful but takes some time to master. If you're a new member of the site or if you grew frustrated with the older version of the tool (which our own Daniel Burka admitted in a previous blog entry http://about.digg.com/blog/digg-search-now-99987-less-suck used to be ... less than amazing), we urge you to give it a try. To make it easier to take full advantage of all our search engine has to offer, we've broken out a few helpful tips:

Learn Your ABCs
You can find a wealth of information by simply plugging in a keyword or two, but our advanced shortcuts really give the search engine some bite. Want to see only promoted stories (those that have hit the front page)? Just add +p to your search string. For example, all promoted stories related to President Obama can be found by typing “Obama +p” in the search field – that's without the quotation marks, of course. If you want to see what Obama-related stories were promoted before later being buried by the community, try “Obama +p +b”. A full list of the shortcuts can be found on the search page http://digg.com/search/.

Fun With Filters
You can filter domains by including -d in your search. So, if you want to exclude CNN's coverage of the president, try “Obama -dcnn.com”. We also have a domain filter on the left column of every search result page (http://digg.com/search?s=Digg, for example) To search within a single domain's offerings just begin your query with “site:domain.com”. For even more filtering fun, you can isolate specific media types, different age ranges of submissions, topics and more via the links in the left column.

Protip – More on Domains: If you're checking out a submission and you're interested in discovering more from the domain that story comes from, you don't need to navigate to the search page. Instead, just click on the domain in the submission description. But please note that, by default, the search results will include only items that have received at least 50 Diggs. For a list of everything that has been submitted from that domain, look on the left side of the results page for the link that reads “revert to all diggs.”

Feeding Time
Find yourself searching for the same topics periodically? Take advantage of our customizable search feeds. Just put together as specific a search string as you'd like and then look for the orange RSS icon in the upper-right corner of the result page. Pop that link into your reader of choice (Google Reader is a good place to start) and you're golden.

We're always looking for feedback, so please hit us with your questions or comments. You can contact us via email at http://digg.com/contact or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/digg_community

Hasta pronto,
T.J.