Google has launched its new Blog Search tool and reaction has started to filter through.

Word Munger is concerned about the lack of plagiarism protection. This may be partly because the new search isn't a true full-text search across all sources, as some publishers only syndicate first paras or excerpts of content via RSS.

You can limit searches by title, author and date or date range. You can also limit results to a specific language, or apply the Safe Search filter to results.

You can also save a blog search as an alert that will be updated any time new content is posted. Additionally you are able to issue a query and then subscribe to that query via your RSS feed reader.  

Word Munger has also noted that you can do a link search for a main blog URL and this will uncover in-links that Technorati may have missed.

The tool comes in various language flavours already: Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, and Spanish, with more promised soon.

When I type "Google Search" into the exact phrase box this afternoon it returns a "Server Error"!