Why Digg and Other Sites Should Use Google Search For Their Site

March 23, 2007

You know it’s bad when you get better results by searching with Google, than searching on a particular site. Take Digg.com. First, let me state I have no problem with Digg. I am a loyal Digg user and loyal Google user, and the symptoms in this article have happened a hand full of times and are not limited to Digg.

I listen to Diggnation and often they have a particular article in the podcast they I want to see on Digg, so I head over to Digg and search for the words I think would bring up the article. But no go, so I type them in Google and more often than not the results are in the first eight results. Let’s take a look at an example. There is an article on Digg that was very popular about a tourist paying $200 to launch a rocket launcher in Cambodia for fun. So I search for “Cambodia rocket launcher” in Digg and Google. I can’t find the results in Digg, here they are. But in Google, the result is #6. If I add $200 to the beginning of the query, it’s #1 in Google and still no where to be found on Digg. And these results are not even site specific using “site: digg.com” in Google. So why is this?

Well for Digg there are several problem:

The “quick” search box in the header of Digg by default only searches through the last 7 days. I understand that this is probably done for performance reasons, but the chances are what I am looking for is further back than a week.
The second problem I spy is Digg search is not a smart as Google’s search. There five options when searching through Digg stories. That’s too many, by now users are use to the search engine doing the thinking for them. And if worse comes to worse have search shortcuts like to set the search parameters in the query. That way with one query I can specify I want to search further back than 1 week, without having to first search and then set my options.

Digg is not alone on this island, many sites have clunky search that do not return the wanted results most of the time. I find myself searching with Google the majority of the time. So why should sites use Google Search for their site, well here are a couple reason I could think of.

Saved resource: I can’t even imagine the CPU resource nightmare that Digg has. I have heard Kevin Rose speak of their server growth rate. Every time Digg orders a server from their provider they get a little foam Linux penguin, Kevin states that the Digg office is littered with the little squeezable guys. which gives on a good idea that they are always needing more power. If you offload search to Google, you can save a good chunk of resources on your server. Furthermore you will not have to set restrictive default parameters, like 1 week with Digg.
Google is good at search: By now it’s obvious that Google is very good at search, and can return better results than what most services can. It’s as simple as that. There is not need to reinvent the wheel, when the wheel is already really good.
Get some extra bling: With Google search on your site you can generate income on the ads that Google displays. The page is completely brand able, so the look and feel can be the same as all of your other pages. With the amount of page hits and search queries that I can only imagine Digg serves up on a daily basis, they could generate some serious income.

Yes there are some pitfalls to using Google search:

Competitor ads and search results if the user is not searching site specific.
For services like Digg, you will not be able to search through comments, members name, etc. These service specific options are useful in some cases.
General lack of control can also be a problem, it’s not home brewed so there are limitations on what you can do with the search.

With the type of traffic that some of these services bring in, I am sure they might be able to strike a deal with Google for a more fluent and controllable search. I may be wrong, but in the mean time I have setup Firefox search extensions for services like Digg that use Google for searching as a pose to Digg. No harm no foul.