Amidst the clamor for Google or Yahoo! to launch blog-specific searching, Robin Good notes that Microsoft released to new feed-oriented search operators in MSN Search:

• feed: The feed operator returns feeds matching the search query. The results are raw feeds; click on one and you get .xml code. However, click on the "Cached page" link to see an intelligible feed display as you would in a newsreader. MSN crawls full feed content.

• hasfeed: this operator returns matched results of Web pages that include a link to a feed. By and large, the linked feed is the feed for that page or site, not another, so hasfeed: offers a secondary and more familiar, Web-centric method of finding content.

These new operators are important and groundbreaking. While this feature does not constitute a blog search engine (all kinds of information sites provide feeds, not just blogs), angling into the MSN Search index via feed searching brings up revelatory results. Furthermore, this creates a centralized location for blog-specific searching.