For many blog readers, Technorati has long been the choice for blog searches.  Traditional search engines aren't the best tools for finding blog information because, in many cases, they take too long to index new blog posts.  Technorati, and others like it, offer an almost up-to-the-minute look at the blogosphere.  For many months Technorati has reigned over the growing world of blog search engines.

But as Pandia reports, our friendly neighborhood search giant, Google, has recently taken over that number one spot with it's Blog Search service.

According to reports released on Thursday by Hitwise, Google Blog Search saw an astounding 168% increase in use over a two-week period in October.  After Google placed a link to Blog Search on the Google News front page, they began to see 60% of the traffic to Google Blog Search coming from that link.  The numbers are actually pretty amazing.  And a chart on the Hitwise illustrates the rapid climb of traffic in graphical form.

To be totally honest, I'm not sure this can be entirely true.  I'm not questioning Hitwise's numbers.  But I personally just find it hard to believe.  But who knows.  Regardless, it's apparent from Google's placement of the Blog Search in the "more" link on the main Google search page that they're finally serious about getting the word out on Blog Search.