Google has relaunched Google Blog Search with a new home page containing clustered links to recent blog posts.

The new homepage is more similar to Google News, in that it puts up popular news topics in the center column. At the moment of writing, examples of such topics are “The Palin-Biden debate” and “OJ Simpson guilty of armed robbery, kidnapping”.

The headline points to one of the most popular blog posts, while alternative links are provided under the summary. There is also a link (in green, over the selected illustration) to a result page presenting a large number of relevant blog posts.

The new Blog Search home page works well, and has turned the service into more than a search engine. It may actually be used as a tool for news surveillance and trend analysis, and functions as a good supplement to Google News.

This is not a Google innovation, though. Others have done this for quite some time. Take, for instance, a look at Techmeme, a blog aggregator focusing on technology news. Technorati does something similar, as do voting based systems like Digg and Propeller. The latter go beyond the blogosphere, though.

Our friends over at Internetbrus argue that this new development could be leading up to a closer integration of Google News and Google Blog Search.

There is certainly nothing much to stop Google from integrating a selection of these headlines into the Google News home page. One reason may be that Blog Search continues to be more vulnerable to spam. Google News is, after all, based on hand picked news resources. Blogsearch does its selection automatically.

Browse what the world is saying on Blog Search (Official Google Blog)