Yahoo News has opened the gates of its media heaven to bloggers. Unlike Google News, which indexed approximately 5,000 sources (only in English), Yahoo News used only a few dozen sources, which were chosen because of their reputation. The links were displayed by an editorial team, not by a spider as it happened with Google News.

But Yahoo's officials have realized that, in this way, they are losing a large number of hot topics, which were not covered by the news agencies and sites indexed by Yahoo News.

So, Yahoo News has started to display the results obtained by indexing thousands of sites owned by online journalism enthusiasts.

Practically, when searching after a certain keyword, Yahoo will not only display the links available so far, but also the ones created by bloggers. Currently, the service is in beta stage and only a limited number of blogs are included, but Yahoo's ultimate goal is to index all 20 million addresses available through the blo.gs service, the portal acquired in June 2005.

Yahoo will also index the images and the links posted by the users who are regularly updating their blogs.

Obviously, there were some who criticized Yahoo over this announcement, claiming that, in this way, the difference between a journalist and a blogger grows thin.

Google, which has recently launched a specialized search engines for blogs, wasn't as brave, Google News remaining a separate service.