Yahoo! adds blogs to news search results

Today Yahoo! began integrating blog search results within Yahoo! News Search. The Yahoo! Search Blog wrote:

"Now when you search on Yahoo! News you will see blog results as well as content from thousands of trusted news sites. The experiences and opinions published on blogs make a great addition to the mainstream news people read everyday."

Yahoo! is also integrating Flickr photos and links from My Web into the new-look news search service, which they are calling "a large grassroots media network".

This is just the beginning of Yahoo!'s mission to bring together user-generated content with 'professional' content, in their quest to help define what 21st century media will be. Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel spoke about this strategy at the Web 2.0 Conference held last week in San Francisco. By "bringing mainstream and personal media together", as the Yahoo! Search Blog put it, Yahoo! hopes to tap into the huge knowledge base that exists in the blogosphere.

This is still a beta service, so there is currently a limited number of blogs included in results. However Yahoo! says it will "ultimately include the 20+ million blogs from the blo.gs ping stream." [Yahoo! bought blo.gs in June 2005]. 

I think integrating user-generated content and mainstream media is an excellent way to introduce fresh new content to peoples media diet. The best blogs are based on passion and expertise, which is a natural complement to more formal news journalism. In time perhaps the "personal media" will move from the right column of Yahoo! News Search to the center, so that it's fully integrated with mainstream media. But for now it's a great way to start the transition to what 21st century media will become.