Yahoo Adds Blogs To News SearchYahoo Adds Blogs To News Search

Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday added blogs to the professional media that are listed in results when using the portal's News Search service.

In addition, News Search includes photos from Flickr, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company's photo-sharing service; and links found in Yahoo's My Web, which lets subscribers save links to Web pages and share them with others.

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.

Yahoo's approach to searching blogs differs from rival Google Inc., which last month launched a dedicated search tool for blogs. Among the major portals, which include Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, Google is the first to offer a separate tool for blogs.

The online advertising potential in blogs is increasing as the number of readers increases. In July, 29.3 million people, or 20 percent of active U.S. web users, accessed blogs or blog-related sites, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That number represented a 31 percent increase since the beginning of the year.