From the Yahoo! Search Blog:
During Hurricane Katrina millions of people came to Yahoo! News for authoritative information. At the same time thousands of bloggers were posting first-hand accounts, photos, personal stories, and opinions. But without mainstream exposure, many important voices went unheard.Today we’ve begun the integration of blogs in Yahoo! News Search. 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. And major world events are further fueling the growth of blogs as platforms for anyone who wants to have a public voice. At times, even everyday bloggers beat the mainstream media to a story.
In addition to blog posts, we will also be including Flickr photos and links from My Web, tapping into a large grassroots media network. By bringing mainstream and personal media together we can offer a greater variety of sources and viewpoints to the millions of people who want to find out what’s going on in the world.
The search index we are beta testing currently contains content from a subset of blogs, but look for this to continue growing and ultimately include the 20+ million blogs from the blo.gs ping stream.
(Blog content appears in the sidebar on the right when you do a Yahoo! News Search.)