Search giant Google has jumped on to the blogging band-wagon, by releasing a beta version of its long-awaited Blog Search. With this move, Google has joined the handful of sites which help users search for topics of interest, in the wide blogosphere.

Sites such as Blogdigger.com, Feedster.com, Technorati.com and Bloglines.com are already up and running for some time. But it is believed that a Google or Yahoo would still be the preferred choice for people learning to surf the net.

Google maintains that its Blog Search will offer users a better way of finding out what s being written in blogs, as they are being created.

Blog Search will index blogs that collect information about other blogs, as well as publish feeds. Google s new service is geared to update with new content faster than standard web searches and find date ranges and posts with greater accuracy. Further, blog searches can be saved as queries or alerts that get updated automatically.

This feature is designed to offer both a Google and Blogger look and feel to users. Users of Blogger and Blogspot will be able to check other blogs through a special box on the site.

Results will be presented in the familiar Google interface; but Blog Search will also cater to RSS or Atom feeds. It is available in languages like English, Spanish, German, French, Russian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Korean etc. While the results can be restricted to any of the supported languages, the default is set to include all of them.

The new service supports all the standard search operators plus 4 new ones i.e. blogurl, inpostauthor, inposttitle and inblogtitle.

However, Google s Blog Search appears to be over-zealous in its search for content, with reports coming in of the service indexing certain blogs with meta tags in them. But sources reveal that Google has taken notice of this problem and is working towards its elimination.

Source: http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/article.jsp?article_id=68123&cat_id=643