That said, it has been missing some key features. For one, there hasn’t been a good way to track breaking news stories as they happen — generally stories only pop up as they gain momentum and are written about by multiple sites, which can take quite a while (relatively speaking). There also hasn’t been a way to subscribe to a feed of the latest stories via RSS, which nearly every other similar site offers.

Today, Blog Search is finally adding these features. Each feed now offers its own RSS/Atom feeds, as well as an iGoogle gadget that integrates new top stories into your Google homepage. Finally, the site has added sections for both ‘Hot Queries”, which shows the most popular search terms, and “Latest Posts”, an unfiltered view of the latest blog posts indexed by the search engine. These last two features could be quite useful for tracking breaking news, especially given how fast Blog Search is at finding new blog posts.

Unfortunately, they’re not quite there yet. My biggest gripe is that the ‘hot queries’ and ‘latest posts’ sections are not category-specific. In other words, when I’m browsing through the Technology section of Blog Search, I’m still being shown new posts about McDonalds, Exxon, and Asteroids. The Hot Queries section is equally irrelevant. This is especially strange given that Google is already categorizing the blog posts into different sections based on their topic, and I’m hoping that Google will at least offer a filtered view as an option.

Remember when Google demoted Froogle from the top tier of the front page and replaced it with a link to Google Video? Traffic to the video site went way up. The underloved Google Blog Search is likely to see substantial growth as well – it turned one year old in mid-September and this could be its coming of age.

Even prior to this month’s launch of Google’s own ping server, I’ve long thought that Google Blog Search is one of the best options available. Unless I want to filter sources by number of inbound links, or peruse an index of blogs (both Technorati’s strong points) then Google Blogsearch is my preferred choice. I’ve found anecdotaly that it finds new blog posts faster than other blog search engines and some very rough research we did found that to be true.

Steve Rubel noticed the same thing tonight and pointed out that Google Blogsearch has been integrated with Google Finance for some time. It’s very strange that when the new Google Reader came out this month, blog search was not included in that service. Also yet to make an appearance: a blog about Google Blog Search (there are so many other Google Blogs, I’d really like to read that one if it existed) and ads run against blog search results. Surely both of those are coming and it’s only a matter of time.

Yahoo! on the other hand removed their blog search functionality and results from Yahoo! News in August. There was almost no public discussion of the move at all but the company says that blog search will return to Yahoo! once it works better.

As far as the other big guys go, Ask has a nice blog search feature that includes related RSS feeds along side the search results and splog filtering using Bloglines; Live.com has a feed search included in its “more” section but no separate blog search. Which of them will really make good use of blog search first? It could very well be Google.