Get What You Want Out Of Digg

Digg is filled with a ton of cool stuff alongside a ton of crap. The best way to filter through all of the crap is to use RSS feeds. Digg offers an RSS feed for each category that is covered on the website. Although this type of filtering is great, I think it’s better to take it up a notch.

Unlike YouTube or any number of other websites, Digg actually makes it fairly easy to subscribe to a keyword search. Type in a keyword or two into the Digg search box and view the results page. On this results page, you should see a small RSS icon that will allow you to subscribe to that specific keyword search. Now, anytime a post is published on Digg containing those keywords, you’ll be notified in your feedreader. This gives you the utmost control over which content you consume within Digg.

Here are a few tips to help you create your customized Digg RSS feed:

Most of the time, in order to create effective keyword searches, you have to manipulate the URL to include or exclude variables. Think of the Search Box on Digg as a GUI for your keyword feed. All three drop down boxes contain options which can aid in refining your search results. For instance, search results can be set up so that only articles with the keywords mentioned in the title are displayed. Or, you can make it so that only keywords within the article content are displayed ect.

My advice is to use quotation marks ” “ around your search phrase or keywords. This tells Digg that you want to see results with keywords that appear in a specific order. For example, let’s say I set up a search feed for the words icon pack. The results will show articles that contain the words icon, pack, and icon pack. I wanted to know about icon packs, not someone who has past away who was described as an icon. By using quotation marks, I’ll only see results that have a combination of “icon pack” together as one keyword.

Once you have configured your custom search, click on the search button. Located on the far right hand side of the page, you should see a tiny RSS icon. This icon contains the RSS feed URL you want to subscribe to which contains all of your search criteria that you configured before pressing the search button. After you subscribe, you’ll now be able to glance within your feed reader to see if any stories match your search criteria without having to wade through so much garbage.

Don’t be afraid of having too many RSS feeds. There is no such thing.

P.S. This one goes out to you Sierra.