The social-news site released the new feature on April 2. It adds a thin strip to the top of pages submitted to Digg that includes the number of times other users voted on, or “Dugg,” the link, the number of times the page was viewed and other statistics and browsing options. The toolbar also created a shortened Web address, like http://digg.com/d1ooR7, that appeared instead of the original URL.

The changes alarmed some publishers and Web developers, who worried that sites could lose traffic–which can affect advertising dollars–if visitors were bookmarking Digg URLs and not their own, or if the Digg addresses would appear in Google (GOOG) results.

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