Digg search not very deep

I had occasion recently to search on Digg, and was surprised to see that one of the words on the search string that was matched was the definite article, “the”. Try it. Even for the word “the” on its own, you’ll get matches. It even matches with other useful words like “these”.

This is surprisingly dumb for one of the most visited sites on the Internet. There are two reasons to strip out very common words like “the” and, uh, “and”: first the results are unlikely to be meaningful and second by removing them before doing a search you reduce the load on your (in this case, very busy) server. Load is evidently a problem, as Digg’s search is also liable to return nothing more than a helpful message saying:

Digg is experiencing a high volume of traffic right now. Please try your search again later.

I’m not the only one who finds Digg’s search unimpressive. It’s slightly ironic that a site whose purpose is to pass judgement on other sites - albeit collectively - is so flawed in one of its fundamentals. (Sensibly I tested my own site search before posting this… and — whoops — found a bug. Fixed now!)