Google’s newly revamped Blog Search site is winning praise in the blogosphere that it tracks.

Reacting to the launch, Darren Rowse in the Problogger blog said, “I like what I see,” though he wished for a way to subscribe to top stories in each category. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb called the site “cleaner and less spammy than Technorati” and “more transparent than Yahoo Buzz.”

The new site signals a tougher competitor for blog search engines like IceRocket, Techmeme, and Technorati.

Like Google News, Google’s Blog Search site http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en, has a list of categories (Top Stories, U.S., World, Business…) in the left column, while links to the blogs are on the right.

On Thursday afternoon, for example, Google found 188 blogs about the upcoming vice presidential debate between Governor Sarah Palin and Senator Joe Biden. A chart that accompanies each topic cluster found that over 16 hours, blogging posts on the debate spiked to more than 20 between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. Wednesday.

A blog by Google product manager Michael Cohen said the search-engine giant was not finished with the revised Blog Search site and planned to add new features and support for additional languages in the coming months.