Imagine, if you will, Michael Richards, high on drugs, screaming "NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER I HATE NIGGERS" over and over again for hours and hours. Add to that an evangelic Christian screaming "FIND CHRIST" at the top of his lungs, once every 45 minutes precisely. Finally, imagine an overweight 40-year old divorced mother crying and saying "why is everybody so mean". This is what the Yahoo boards were like.
Earlier this year, Yahoo removed blog search from Yahoo News. In a reverse direction, Google integrated blog search into Google News, added a link on the homepage, and now Google Blog Search has more visits than Technorati.
While there are still many spam blogs, search engines should focus on detecting them and not decide to ignore blogs. The real news discussion is not in news articles, it's in blogs, comments and forums. Blogs are permanently connected, interactive and more honest. Newspapers and traditional news sites realized that and now a lot of news come from blogs.
I think Google shouldn't stop at adding a link to blog search in Google News. They should try to connect news articles with blog posts and add more interactivity. The great thing about blogs is that they make you feel a part of the news as it happens.