Google has opened up its much anticipated facility to search blogs, the millions of frequently updated online diaries.

The search engine giant was expected to launch the service two years ago after it acquired Blogger, a service that allows users to create and maintain blogs.

Google's service lines up against the likes of Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket, Blogpulse and Daypop which track chunks of the 17 million known blogs. Google has not revealed how many blogs it is currently tracking.

The service allows searches in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese and other languages.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN have already been indexing blogs in their general search engines, and the Google move is likely to be followed by similar services from the other two.

Mark Rogers

"The next challenges will be to extend live search from the blogs to the web as a whole, and to make sense of the sheer volume of live results from tens of millions of constantly changing websites."

• Google blog search
• Personal blogs on vnunet.com
• Interactive Home
• The Test Bed
• Silicon Valley Sleuth
• The i-Kew

, of web benchmarking service Market Sentinel, said: "Google is to be congratulated on its product. It is not highly featured, but it has a clean, simple friendly interface.