The internet company Google appears to be on another winner with the launch of a service that allows users to search the blogosphere for the latest weblog postings on any subject they choose.

Google Inc is already a major player in the weblog market through its purchase two years ago of the start-up Pyra Labs and its Blogger service that allows computer-users to set up their own personal sites in minutes.

Since that deal, internet pundits have been waiting for Google to launch a blog search tool, which it finally did yesterday with the Beta or test release of its Blogsearch engine at http://blogsearch.google.com.

"There really has been a need for a world-class search product to expose this dynamic content to a worldwide audience," said Jason Goldman, the Google product manager responsible for the new search tool.

Tech-focused bloggers argued about the merits of the new service, but widely praised its speed, especially compared to the niche search engines which already index weblogs for searches, including Technorati and Blogpulse.

Instead of using "spiders" to trawl through weblogs, as the main Google search engine does through the wider web, its Blogsearch tool simply monitors existing RSS or Atom blogfeeds, which are used to channel weblog content onto websites or directly into individuals web browsers or e-mail accounts. The advantage of that is that the search results appear to be much fresher than some of its rivals'.

Users can also set up Google searches within their own RSS readers, allowing them to monitor what is being written about their chosen topics more effectively.

Google is the first major internet player to lauch a search engine specifically for blogs, although Yahoo! and other competitors are expected to do so within months. The number of active blogs doubles around every five months, and Technorati.com currently tracks 17.1 million sites.

Google said its tool would allow searches not just for blogs written in English but also in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Portuguese.

In their early reviews of the service, some search engine bloggers complained that Google's new tool lacked the depth of some of its competitors in terms of sites indexed and, therefore, produced fewer results on every search.

But a search by Times Online on both Technorati and the Google Blogsearch for the term "Wayne Rooney" - in English only - produced more results on Google and with a more accessible presentation.

Duncan Riley, who posts on the Blogherald.com, gave the new service mixed marks, and said after his initial testing that he was "really disappointed with it".

But he later posted on another site, Threadwatch.org, and said: "Been playing with it some more, the pick-up time of posts is out of this world compared to the competition. As long as they can build up some of the older stuff and broaden the number of blogs quickly this is going to be the market leader very, very soon."

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