Google has updated its Blog Search service with a number of new features, including a Twitter-like option that lets users view the most popular queries of the moment.
The Hot Queries feature lists the searches that are currently the most popular among those using Google Blog Search, while the Latest Posts offering displays the newest entries from popular blogs.
"While Hot Queries highlights what people are looking for, Latest Posts lets you find out about stories even before people start searching for them," say Akshay Patil, software engineer, and Dylan Casey, product manager at Google, in a blog post.
Other new additions include RSS and Atom feeds for those who want to subscribe to a particular topic or story, as well as an iGoogle gadget enabling users to embed the front page of the Blog Search into their iGoogle or other compatible pages.
Google says that it made the changes in response to messages from users asking for several new features, with the RSS and Atom feeds being the most requested options.
Meanwhile, Microsoft announced earlier this week that it has started to integrate results from Twitter into its own search listing pages.
Users who search for a person's name and a Twitter-related term will see a listing that shows the latest posts from that user as well as a link to their account, although the integration only includes a few thousand of the most prominent Twitter members at present.
