It looks like Google has finally launched a weblog-specific search engine, a move that I’d imagine is reasonably sure to doom Technorati and it’s smaller cousin, Daypop. (It also doesn’t help Technorati compete when its service has become unreliable enough to inspire both annoyed rants and sites of outright mockery.) It’s not like people didn’t see this coming; for a while now, Google has done a fairly good job of quickly indexing weblogs and liberally returning hits to the sites in its search results, and a specialized search site is the logical extension to that. The new search engine sits behind the blogsearch.google.com address, the search.blogger.com address, and the navigation bar at the top of every Blogspot website, and it looks like it sustains itself on a steady diet of sites that alert one of the weblog update notification services (although the folks at Google don’t share a comprehensive list of the services that are used). As with all things new from Google, it’s labeled “beta”, so I imagine we’ll see a bunch of improvements in the coming weeks and months.