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Search results on Topix now include blog results, and the site said blog posts should show up in the index and on the site within 3 minutes of being crawled.

Topix.net noted today how 15,000 blogs will be drawn into their engine and tagged. Once indexed, the posts will be part of the 30,000 local feeds and 300,000 subject feeds Topix offers.

The site goes past the "bloggers are/are not journalists" issue by asking a different question:

Are blog posts news?

Others are doing a great job of providing relevant keyword search against blogs. But our mission is to discover the news within the sea of blog posts, and report them by location and subject.
Topix also said 15,000 was an "arbitrary cutoff for this first release." Their internal testing worked better than expected, driving the company to move forward quickly to make those blogs part of Topix.

Blog results will be highlighted so users can tell them apart from mainstream media items. Topix said on its site the current beta and the final product probably won't look the same.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.