The only thing I’ve figured out that works is building a Google Custom Search Engine with your favorite list of 50-100 blogs but it’s far from perfect and doesn’t help with new discovery.
Partially but no, it’s comparatively pretty bad after playing with it a lot.
It seems to be based on a much older and more literal algorithm where it buries a relevant post on page 3 just because the keyword was not perfectly in the title.
Probably intentional or they just don’t prioritize since a small % of people use it.
Better to use “site:” search for your fav blogs instead.