An apology is due – until today, Digg’s search has been pretty terrible. I’m really excited to announce that our search no longer sucks. In fact, I think it’s awfully good but you should try it out and judge for yourself.

Our primary focus is to give you the best possible stories at the top of the results right away. The first thing you’ll notice is an improved user interface but don’t let that fool you, there are significant improvements under the hood. We weight searches on a number of factors including timeliness, Digg counts, keywords, and others.

What’s new?

• A faceted model for filtering results means you can cut your results by factors like Digg count, topic, time, etc. It gives you a lot more information about your query and enables you to drill down to your result much more effectively.

• Advanced shortcuts allow people who are looking for stories with specific promotion characteristics to filter effectively. Add +p to your query for only promoted stories, +u for upcoming stories, and +b for buried.

• Common search tricks – like putting your query in quotes for an exact match and adding a negative sign before the term (i.e., -term) to remove that term from your results – now work.

• A graph showing the relative number of search results by month for the past several years gives some visibility into the trend of a particular query term over time.

• Searching for stories from a particular domain is much more effective. We weight recent domain-related results higher when you type in the full domain. Also, if you want to filter any query by domain, type it into the domain filter in the left column.

• New RSS feeds are much more useful. We’ve always had RSS feeds for searches, but with the new faceting capabilities, this becomes a lot more effective. You could create a feed that gives you stories with over 1000 Diggs about X and Y but never when keyword Z appears… handy!

• Search is faster now too. Not only have we added more functionality to the search, but we’re usually getting your search back to you significantly faster.

This new search will also serve as a foundation for a number of upcoming projects, so we’re happy to have it out in the wild. Go kick the tires and let us know what you think either by clicking the feedback link at the bottom of any search result or in the comments for this post.

As always, stay classy
Daniel