In an interesting twist with both upsides and downsides, Yahoo has rolled blogsearch into their news search service. Information Week picks up the addition:

The blending of citizen and professional journalism is to give consumers "a more complete search experience," the company said in a statement.

"Our expanded news search dramatically increases the consumer’s ability to find events that matter to them, from major news stories, citizen reporting, commentary, and pictures that might not be covered by the mainstream media," Neil Budde, general manager of Yahoo News, said in a statement.

The initial search returns links to professional news organizations, with blog links in a separate box to the right. Clicking on "all blog results" will get photo thumbnails from Flickr and My Web links, which are also displayed to the right of results from mainstream media.

Content publishers can add blogs to Yahoo News Search by visiting a publisher page on the portal.

They're right. Listing blogs with other news sites legitimises blogs as sources of information, and validates them to some degree. I'm not sure, though, that all blogs are news, or that searching for the one & finding the other will be a satisfying experience. My mind, however, is open!! Let's see how this works out & what other people have to say about the service.

To submit your content for addition to search results, complete Yahoo's RSS Publisher Form. If your site is already available to MyYahoo users, you won't need to do this.