ThoughtfulChaos

The blogsearch FAQ page says:

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; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.

I am pleased with this new service because:

1. My blog appears first if you search for 'varun' :-) In fact the first 30 entries (at least) are from my blog! Yay!
2. I feel that Google will be much more reliable than Technorati in indexing and ferreting out information about blogs. Its huge index and more powerful crawling capabilities will also help it in being much more scalable than the not-so-reliable and slow Technorati.

The search includes blogs that publish a site feed (RSS or Atom). They also have an atom and RSS feed for the search results but at the very bottom. Dear Google, could you please put that somewhere near the top? All the result URLs are the slightly irritating redirection URLs as of now. I think they will take it out when the offering comes out of beta. I tried out a few different searches but none of them threw up ads so it seems right now the service is ad-free.

Technorati also has a similar offering called Blog Finder but Google Blog Search feels much better (more about this after I use it for a few days...)