Recently, Google has launched its Blog Search Engine which works in the same basic way as the normal Google Search Engine that we are all so familiar with, except that it only indexes blogs.

If a blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service, then Google’s Blog Search Engine should be able to find it and certainly so far it seems to be doing a good job in that respect. An added feature, particularly relevant to blogs, is that it allows you to sort the results not only by relevance, but also by date.

However, this is not to discuss its relative merits but rather to highlight some of the special search operators that it has over and above those that we already have available from the main Google Search Engine – a list of these main operators can be found on Google’s site.

In addition to these, Blog Search supports the following new operators of its own:

inblogtitle:
Every blog has its own title as part of its set-up and this is what is searched through to return results. This does not refer to all that is in the “Title tag” which will vary according to the page or all that is included in the URL.

inposttitle:
This searches through the titles of the posts which are made in a blog - again this is a specific field you create when creating a post in your blog, and it is important for this and other reasons to choose an appropriate one.

inpostauthor:
This will return anything where the author’s name corresponds with the search term. For example, a search such as - emarketing inpostauthor:Mark - will return posts containing the word ‘emarketing’ which have been posted by people named ‘Mark’.

blogurl:
This does not return words which are only present in the main domain name of the blog but in the rest of the URL. In many blogging systems, this is likely to return similar results as a search using inposttitle

There is an alternative way to achieve this by using the Advanced Search option which is accessible from the main Blog Search page and will allow you to sift through the results in the same way.

All useful stuff and certainly makes it clear of the importance that Google places on the role that blogs are already playing which will no doubt develop further.