PicasaWeb adding real search function

According to the Google Blog, Picasa Web Albums are finally gaining the ability to search across all public photos.

The post by Mike Horowitz, Picasa Product Manager, is frank in admitting that this is a long awaited feature, that goes under the name of "Community Photos search". 

The same post also mentions other new features, such as

• "Free storage is now 1GB (and counting)" suggesting they are moving to the same model as Gmail which automatically increases the storage size as time goes by
• Linking to photos and albums is now easier - the link code provided now offers a choice of photo sizes, and the URL scheme has been improved so that the photo size is part of the URL path, and not tacked on the end as a parameter which tended to confuse many tools

There is some more information on the What's New page, which also lists

• View Blogger photos
  All photos uploaded through Blogger now appear in My Photos. The titles of these Blogger web albums match the titles of their respective blog posts. Now the photos you use in both services can be managed from one place. Learn more.

 

I really want to try out the photo search, but I can't seem to find it - I guess that the feature may only be enabled in certain accounts for the moment.  The improved photo linking is certainly in place, and space is reported as 1GB, though I can't see evidence yet that the storage space is indeed "counting".