Google Blog Search and Technorati are two blog search engines I use regularly, hence I should be able to make a comparison between them by evaluating the main features. If you don’t know the differences between a blog search engine and a web search engine click here.

Technorati is both a social networking system and a search engine for blogs, but search results are ordered only by freshness and you have not the possibility to choose another way to sort them. In my opinion this is the weakness of Technorati. Indeed I use Technorati just to look for news in the blogosphere, that’s that.

Instead, by using Google Blog Search you can sort search results both by date and by relevance (default setting). Google experience in searching brings a better accuracy in result, but it’s not so unusual to obtain search results which are not blogs. And this is not good for a blog search engine! Maybe this is due by the fact that Google Blog Search is still a beta version and only recently has launched an own Pinging Service.

When in mid December 2006 Google Blog Search surpassed Technorati in market share of visits (although TechCruch didn’t agree with the stats by hitwise) I was not surprised. It has been enough to place a link to Blog Search on the Google News home page to rocket its traffic.

I think Google Blog Search reaches mainly people that have never used a blog search engine before. Moreover most people could not like a blog search engine that lists just recent posts, such as Technorati. This might be good for who’s looking for (technology) news, but not for the remaining people.