Anyone who’s been using Digg’s search feature in the last couple of weeks, if not months, knows that it has occasionally been rather slow or even non-responding.

After Digg’s latest maintenance downtime I’ve noticed that the search is missing one feature: the time frame. Look at the screenshot below:

Before, you were able to set the search timeframe to 7 days, 30 days, 365 days or all time. Now, the feature is gone. Being quite an important feature (I’ve used it regularly) of Digg’s search which isn’t exactly brimming with options anyway, the only reason I can see for this change is improving its performance. Currently, Digg search works fine, and much faster than before; however there’s no way of telling if this is just temporary and due to the time of day (as of this writing it’s night or early morning in the US). I sincerely hope that the time frame option will get reintroduced soon, though; removing important features is never the best way of solving problems.