Google has finally launched a blog search tool. The new service is available at: www.google.com/blogsearch, blogsearch.google.com, search.blogger.com/ and your Blogger dashboard.

There is a lengthy blog search help page that details the nuances of Google's new toy.

By default the search results are shown by relevance, although you can switch over to 'by date'. A search for Katrina on Google showed the most recent post being 3 hours old. The same search on Technorati returned posts that were 5 or 6 minutes old. On a related note, it will be interesting to see 'Google Blog Search' as one of the 'Top Searches' on Technorati later today.

It looks like Google is also offering a serivce similar to PubSub with their RSS subscriptions to searches. From the help page:

Can I subscribe to search results?

Yes. At the bottom of each page of search results you can find several links, offering the top 10 or 100 results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just grab the links from here and subscribe to them in the news aggregator of your choice and you will get updates whenever new posts are made that match your query.

In addition, the Advanced Blog Search offers the standard options for narrowing your search quite a bit.

Other reviews: Dave Winer, Search Engine Watch, Charlene Li, The Blog Herald