It seems that each day I visit the popular website Digg as part of my daily routine, I find at least one interesting story there. With this happening, the number of articles that I add to my own bookmarks there (or “digg”) on that site on that site increases. Over time what happens is that it takes more time for me to find an article that I have previously “dugg” when I view my previous diggs. So when I try to find a story that I chose to digg in the past, it takes longer for me to find it than I think it should. And there is no feature on Digg for searching through the stories that I have dugg. And even if such a feature did exist, I’m not sure if it would be as useful as it could be. I find that when searching for stories from Digg’s main page, the search results consist mostly of stories that get very few diggs, and are unlikely to receive many more diggs than the few they have. Finding the articles I would like to find often requires the use of advanced searches, and thus often requires extra mouse clicks and page loads. There had to be a better way for me to find what myself and others find interesting on Digg.
When bringing up Digg, one is, by default, taken to the section that lists stories that are consider “popular” and have already received many diggs. This is one reason that I, for one, often digg stories that have already received many diggs. However, when searching through Digg stories, it does not list only the most popular stories in search results by default. As a result, the majority of search results consist of stories that are highly unlikely to be what I would like to find.
It might be best for me to illustrate the point that I am making with an example. A while ago, I was looking for an article on Digg about Firefox extensions. And since I viewed it quite a while ago, I did not remember the exact title of the article. So when searching for it from Digg’s main page, I entered “firefox extensions” as the search string. As one might imagine, although there may have been some interesting search results listed, I was not going to find what I wanted on the first page of results. Below is a screen shot of what I found on that first page.
I knew there had to be a better way to find what I wanted. What I want to find on Digg and what gets dugg by the community of users on Digg are rarely mutually exclusive, and this case was not an exception. I knew the article that I wanted to find received many diggs, so it would have been better for results to be listed with stories receiving more diggs listed first. And so by using the advanced search feature that appears on the page with search results, I chose to sort the results in order of which stories received the most diggs. And below is a screen shot of the result of this search.
In the results that came up, I found what I wanted to find on the first page of search results. However, I would like to be able to find what I want on the first page of results without having to enter advanced settings. And I have found that it has been more the rule than the exception that I would like to sort search results in order of which stories have received the most diggs. And so how could I make it so that, by default, search results would consist of stories that have been dugg most often? Well, that’s where the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox comes in. I decided to write a Greasemonkey script that would make it so that when searching for stories from Digg’s main page, results would be listed in order of which stories received the most diggs.
You can click here to download and install this Greasemonkey script if you’re using Firefox and you have the Greasemonkey extension installed. This script is a very simple one, but I have found it as useful as it is simple. With so many stories on Digg that can be found, there should be a way of being able to search through the many stories there in a quick and efficient way. And although there is more that could be done to improve searching for stories on Digg, I have found that using this script has made it easier to find what I want there. There might be others who will find this to be the case as well, which is why I have made this script available. It can be good to find what the community of users on Digg finds interesting. Therefore, you will also find this script useful if you want to avoid seeing my blog posts in the search results on Digg.
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