Search Engine for Blogs?
As others have already noted, Google has now unveiled a search engine for blogs.
It's pretty nifty, but I must admit it seems a bit underwhelming. Google already indexed blogs quite well. I would have much preferred Google's advanced search to just have a tick-box saying "restrict to blogs."
UPDATE: A little research leads to an interesting conclusion this evening. Google's BlogSearch claims to respect the privacy of blogs:
Blog Search will also respect robots.txt files and NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW meta tags . . . .
However, when I check a few old blogs in Livejournal that quite definitely have NOINDEX tags on them, they pop up in BlogSearch quite readily.
Back to the drawing board, guys?
Update II: If you have a blog you don't want indexed, particularly if it's already been archived, Google claims you can get it withdrawn by following the instructions here. Of course, since BlogSearch shouldn't have indexed something that had the proper metatags anyway, I don't hold out much hope that the removal feature works.