Google launches blog search engine

Google launched its blog search engine in beta this morning. Don’t worry about the ‘beta,’ about the half the good stuff Google does is in beta.

I expect it’ll be pretty good but have not test driven yet. If nothing else, it’s a loud signal Google views blogs to be a big deal. We now have all the big three, Yahoo, MSN and Google pouring big money into projects involving RSS & blogs. And those poor blog contrarians belittling the power of lawyer blogs.

What is it? From the horse’s mouth:

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results;

You can also subscribe to feeds by the keywords or key phrases you search.

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.

As with Web sites you do not ‘register’ (one of the great lies) to have your blog listed by the search engine.

If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven’t picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.

Just because Google has a blog search engine does not mean your blog will not be found in Google’s main search engine. Blogs are still Web sites run on blog software with additional features a Web site does not offer.

If you’re Technorati, Newsgator, PubSub or other blog search engine/aggregator you’re going to need to keep running pretty fast by adding value to your products. The early adopters may know of you but the masses know of Google and already use it everyday.