Google has unveiled a website that lets people search web journals or blogs.

According to information Google published about the search service, it only started indexing blogs entries made from June 2005. But now it is looking at ways of indexing older posts.

The database behind the search site will index all weblogs not just the ones published on the Google-owned blog writing site Blogger.

"Traditional search engines are good at searching what's on the Web," said Allen Weiner, research vice president with research firm Gartner Inc. But increasingly, people want to focus on specialized areas such as blogs, he said. Google could do for blogs what Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes is doing for podcasts, mostly amateur audio recordings that are downloaded from the Internet to an iPod or other MP3 player. Apple recently introduced a podcast search feature in iTunes that allows users to find, subscribe to and listen to the homemade recordings.

The popularity of blogs and podcasts has created an enormous volume of self-published goods, as well as new opportunities for companies such as Google to lure more people to their sites -- and possibly inflate their bottom lines, too.

"Part of having a say is letting people find what you say," said Jeff Reynar, blog search product manager for Google. The company, which held a secondary stock offering yesterday that raised $4.18 billion, has not said how or if it plans to make money from blog searching.

However, the majotity of interner users - notably those who are still learning to navigate the Web- likely will turn to Google or Yahoo or one of the other search engine sites that have become household names.

"Helping people find their way in the blogosphere is something that is important to us," said Joff Redfern, a product manager for Yahoo , which recently refined its video and audio search tools and is looking to better integrate blog searches.

Increasingly, companies are searching blogs to track mentions of themselves or their products. Even Google itself became the subject of blog postings opining about its latest search tool yesterday.

A blogger on Techcrunch.com offered detailed analysis of Google's blog search tool and offered a conclusion: "Google Blog Search is fast and the ability to sort by relevance or date is an important feature. However, Google [blog] search is not a category killer like the original Google search was. Competitors took a much expected hit today, but they are still standing."

Google's (Beta) blog seacrh can be accessed at http://blogsearch.google.com.