Does changing the blog name/description (in Blogger) have any effects on search?

Thanks for your replies.

@Vijay Prabhu. I guess I will wait for sometime then... 

@Ranjith: Thanks for your help with the code, but I am not sure if I want to go ahead with it. After all, I am tampering with the default Blogger settings, which might not be that good an idea. I will think about it for sometime and then I will decide... Thanks anyway... 

According to me, the ordering of words in the title tag shouldn't make much difference.

Sorry I spelt your name wrongly before  DI, you can add the code Ranjith has given, it actually helps the Google bots to find your blog and list it by article rather then by blog name

DvD it effect the Google Indexing for a week or so till it normalises 

When I search for any individual posts in google, the search results are displayed in this format - Blog Name | Post Title. Can I avoid the blog name getting in the front (In SERP), so that the title keywords get the precedence?

In your template, search for

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

Replace with

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>

 <title><data:blog.title/></title>

<b:else/> 

<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title> />

</b:if>

Do you think the name change might have resulted in this? 

Answers given by different people will differ for this question. I think that it will have an effect to a certain extent, because the blog name appears on every page, which tells Google that the blog is about that topic.

Look at your Google Analytic report and see the keywords which bought traffic to your site before you changed your blog title and after you changed it. Based on that, you can tell whether the title change had an effect.

 I want the new name to be the de-facto in future. 

Think about the long term rather than the short. So, stay with the new name.

So, are there any tips to get this change accepted sooner by Google? 

As far as I know, there are none.