I have never found Google Blog Search to be that good. Frankly, I’ve found it to be intensely spammy, though a lot of that is relieved if you add -inurl:blogspot.com to your query. Google recently announced some new features to its blog search which had me going back to the tool to see how it’s doing. It certainly seems to be a lot less spam-infested. It’s actually pretty good.

Google Blog Search is at http://blogsearch.google.com/. New features include RSS and Atom feeds, at least according to the announcement. (The site didn’t have RSS or Atom feeds up until now? Really?) There’s also a “gadget” so you can get search results on your iGoogle page.

The front page also has recent posts from popular blogs listed, as well as a feature called “Hot Queries,” which the announcement describes as “searches currently popular in Blog Search — it’s an easy way to quickly dive into the trending points of conversation on the web.” I was very surprised at how technical and specific these searches are. If you go over to Icerocket you’ll see that popular searches include things like “Facebook” or “Lakers”. Hottest search on Google Blog at this writing? DOTA 6.61. This is apparently a Warcraft III scenario? Anyhow, it’s way popular. Only two stories on DOTA 6.61 at Google News but it’s all over the blog search.

As part of doing this writeup I did some searching with Google Blog Search, which I had not used in a while because of the spam. Oh, it’s much better. The results are relevant and I found only a teeny bit of spam — not even enough to be a distraction. Even a very general search like DVD brought good results, though things went icky when I switched from listing results by relevance to listing by date. Even then it was miles better.

It’s been a while since I’ve really gotten excited about a blog search engine. But I like how much better Google Blog Search has gotten; I may need to give it another chance.