Google is the first of the major web search tools to launch a dedicated Blog Search – in beta of course. It does not search the full text of the postings, only the RSS and Atom feeds generated by the blog. Older posts that were generated before Blog Search started crawling or are not in a current feed are not included. Google says that it covers “every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom).” When I ran my test searches, it picked up several pages that are not blogs but do have RSS or Atom feeds. For many of us this is not an issue. I am often looking for feeds on a topic or industry sector and do not care whether they are generated by a blog or by some other means. There may be times, though, when one does want to limit a search to blogs so one needs to bear this in mind.

The indexing is fast. Blog Search picked up one of my postings just 22 minutes after I had published it. Results can be sorted by date or relevance.

The Advanced Search has the usual ‘all the words’, phrase, ‘at least one of the words’, and ‘without the words’. Additional options include ‘words in the post title’, ‘words in the blog title’, ‘at this URL’, ‘blogs and posts written by’, limit by date and language.

You can also set up alerts. Go to the bottom of your results page and you can ask to have 10 or 100 results as an Atom or an RSS feed.

You can access Google Blog Search at http://www.google.com/blogsearch for the Google style interface, or at http://search.blogger.com/ if you prefer the Blogger style.