Google releases astonishingly bad Blog Search

The much anticipated Google Blog Search was released today, and now I understand why it was held back for so long. As I've heard, it was being developed for the past 3 years, and has been "on deck" for over a year. Evaluating blog search is hard (evaluating any kind of search is hard), but generally blog search optimizes for either freshness or relevance in actual blog posts, or toggles between the two. You can do that here, but Google blog search is apparently optimized for neither -- its stated purpose is finding blogs on a certain topic, and boy is it bad at that. But what it mostly it delivers is blog posts. Take my search for "celebrity". There's a small chunk at the top giving the "related blogs" to that search, but then the rest of it is classic keyword matching:

Related Blogs:
Celebrity Baby Blog - The only website devoted to celebrity babies (and their parents)!
Celebrity Baby Blog - The internet's only source dedicated to Celebrity Babies!
Hollywood Rag - Celebrity Ragazine - http://www.hollywoodrag.com/index.php/weblog/index/
Celebrity Calls - http://spaces.msn.com/members/calls/
{ KOREAN + celebrity } - Korean Entertainment @ LiveJournal

Oxfam Auction - grab celebrity seconds
5 hours ago by Katie
Oxfam's Suffolk division is due to hold a charity auction of various bits of celebrity jumble. It's being held on the 1st October in Woodbridge, Suffolk.
Sk8 er-girl Avril Levigne (or Lasagne as the Bayraider gang prefer to call her) ... Shiny Shiny - http://www.shinyshiny.tv/

SNL Celebrity Jeopardy
1 hour ago by Best Week Ever
"Here's the entire collection of all 13 "Celebrity Jeopardy" episodes on Saturday Night Live. Enjoy!" Relive your favorite SNL Celebrity Jeopardy moments. I pose a conundrum to you, a riddle if you will. What's the difference between ... Best Week Ever Blog - http://bestweekever.blogs.com/best_week_ever_blog/

Celebrity Fit Club
8 Sep 2005 by Jeanne
The other night while exercising on my recumbent bike, I turned the basement TV set on and watched back-to-back reruns of Celebrity Fit Club on VH1. Talk about a motivator. There is something about watching washed-up celebrities trying ... Out and Back - http://outandback.typepad.com/my_weblog/

I can't see any reason to switch, Technorati's recently release Blog Finder has gone further down the road in the direction I want to go. It's not perfect, but you can see where it's going.