Google Launches Blog Search

Google is ramping up its blog search capabilities, launching a beta version of a dedicated RSS and Atom feed search engine which aims to index every site that publishes a Web feed.

“The goal of Blog Search 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,” according to Google’s FAQ on the new offering.

Search results return both specific posts and entire blogs, which are listed at the top of the results page under “related blogs”. An RSS or Atom feed for the search can also be generated and accessed by an RSS reader. The pages do not currently show AdSense results.

Google has been indexing Atom and RSS feeds since June, so any content that was posted prior to that time is not yet included in the index. Google is working on ways to incorporate older content into its search. Because it indexes feeds and not the Web site itself, a blog using excerpted feeds will not be fully indexed. Dedicated blog search engines like Technorati and Feedster index entire blogs.

Google is taking advantage of the structured data within site feeds to better find precise posts and date ranges. Besides the advanced operators from Google search, such as “link:,” “site:,” or “intitle:,” blog search supports blog-specific operators like “inblogtitle:,” “inposttitle:,” “inpostauthor:,” and “blogurl:.”

Google has already indexed blogs that use updating services like Weblogs.com, and will soon offer a form to manually submit blogs to be indexed.