Quite long awaited move, Google steps in the Blog search field with its new Google Blog Search Beta. There is also an “blogger-style interface” of it at http://search.blogger.com. The stated goal of the search engine is:

to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.

While its still a beta, will comment only on good stuffs that the new blog search engine is bringing to the market, waiting for the bads (like the size of the index) to be fixed.

A first plus: the speed. If you got used with Technorati (to give the worse example of all) then a query with the new Google search engine is like flying vs. walking. Super-fast.

A second super plus: RSS. At the bottom of each page of search results you can find several links, offering the top 10 or 100 results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just grab the links from here and subscribe to them in the news aggregator of your choice and you will get updates whenever new posts are made that match your query.

Adding advanced search features like 35 different languages and classic Google operators (link:, site:, intitle:) or new ones (inblogtitle:, inposttitle:, inpostauthor:, blogurl:) really make me think that this should be a serious competitor for Blogpulse, Feedster and similar blog search engines that are on market at the moment. Will see.

Technorati tags: Google Blog Search, Google, Blog Search