The Digg Bar might be a nuisance, but their new search rocks.

Digg’s search facility has always been a frustration. Noticeably slow and sluggish, with results that made it difficult to find what you were actually looking for.

Yesterday however, the site launched its all new “no longer sucks” (in their own words) Digg Search, and yes – take it from me – it is radically improved.

On testing it out yesterday, the speed was by far my favorite improvement – searching and producing results faster than a blink of an eye. In the past I resorted to switching tabs and reading the news in between searches!

Other features include a multi-faceted filtering system, allowing you to filter by Digg count, topic, time and even website. RSS feeds are now available for search results, allowing you to receive new items that match particular queries directly in your RSS reader. Digg have also added a shortcuts and common Google-like search queries, again improving the ability to find what you want.

The update is impressive and timely considering the recent backlash over the Digg bar. Despite our post earlier this week regarding the impressive features of the Digg Toolbar, over recent days the search ranking and usability elements (or lack thereof) have been a major discussion point. What at first appeared to be a win win for everyone involved, now seems to make it more difficult for the average visitor, less rewarding for site owners and leaves only one real winner – Digg.com.

John Gruber, of popular Mac Blog Daring Fireball, took action almost immediately. He writes:

“..unlike normal URL shortening services, when you load these Digg URLs, rather than redirect you to the original URL, Digg loads a page which frames the content of the original site. As a user, what you see is that the URL in your browser’s location field remains digg.com/1234, and the content of the destination site loads underneath a Digg-branded toolbar.

This, of course, is total bullshit.”

Gruber has therefore added a short bit of code which blocks the Digg Bar entirely from his site and has also made it available to others looking to do the same. What’s most amusing about this though, is the message Gruber leaves for Digg visitors upon trying to access any page on his site: