Google has gone and done it again. Released yet another product to the search community and tagged it as a Beta release. This time it is a Google Blog Search Engine.

With Google owning Blogger (via acquisition in Feb 2003) this is a logical extension of Google’s search technology, to include the ability to search the many billions of blogs out there - including this one. Google Blog Search also searches blogs not created by Blogger and supports the ability to search in multiple languages.

As long as a Blog publishes a site feed via RSS or Atom, it should be included in Google’s Blog Search. That means articles pre June 2005 may not be available, as this is the point that site feeds became common place. Google is apparently looking at ways to include older articles.

Google Blog Search is going to be a great tool to help people research what others are saying out there in blog-land, in near real time. It fills a gap that exists, due to traditional web search latency in including and indexing blog articles. Blogs are fast becoming a major source of news for many people - as proven during the recent Hurricane Katrina, where bloggers were providing first hand accounts of the devastation - as the traditional media was too slow to respond.

Whilst I congratulate Google on delivering another product to market (especially one as useful as Blog Search); I am sure I am not the only one who is asking - “when will the Beta sign fall off all of the other products they have?” It feels like nothing ever gets finished at Google, with more products in Beta than in full release.

Further information about Google Blog Search is available at Google Blog Search Help page.

If you are searching for a blog, try Google Blog Search.