Google’s now on the blog search bandwagon with Google Blog Search . There are good things about it and bad things. It starts off with the regular minimalist Google interface we’ve all come to know and love. Enter a search. Google will give you first blogs that match your query, and then blog entries. Results are initially listed in order of relevance. Search results include post title, snippet, and URL — no caches. Interesting. Down at the bottom of the screen you can get RSS or Atom feeds of the results, either 10 or 100 at a time. (You can change this to between 1 and 100 results by generating the output feed and then changing the &num=xx switch in the URL, where xx is the number of items you want in the feed.)
Google has an impressive advanced search for their blog search.You can search by blog title (special syntax inblogtitle: ) or post title (special syntax inposttitle: ). You can limit your searches to particular URLs. There’s also syntax to limit results by date — either a particular set of dates or a time span (last 6 hours, last 12 hours, etc.) It’s about time that someone took the delineation offered by RSS feeds and made a nice advanced search out of it. I’m sure this is only the beginning.
Some of the regular Google syntax work as well — intitle: works, though it seems to find the same results as inposttitle:. Link: will allow you to find posts that link to a particular page. The site: syntax works. Inurl: works. Unfortunately Google Blog search seems to have a ten-word query limit, unlike the regular Google Web search.