At first glance, Google Blog Search looks very familiar and, initially, it functions the same as the Google homepage: enter your search terms and press ’search’. However, when your results are returned, you may notice a few slight changes. First of all, notice that all the results have the time of publication and the author after the result title. This is derived from the blog post and you can easily narrow down your search by time using the options on the left side of the page.

Digging a little deeper by clicking on the ‘Advanced Blog Search’ link lets you further specify your search request. The first few options are familiar to Google uses and let you specify terms that must or must not be in the result. The next few options allow you to specify words in the title of the post and also which site the posts come from, while the last few options let you specify the author and time of posting. If you know any of this information, you can drastically cut down the number of search results that may be returned.

Finally, Google Blog Search also offers you the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed or email alert of the search results, so that you will be updated whenever a new post that matches your criteria is published (see more about subscribing to sites and searches here).

With blogs becoming an increasingly common source of information and news, having this ability to search through them is becoming more important, and I hope that this information helps you to find what you’re after. If you have any other tips on searching blogs, let me know in the comments!