I really like Topix.net for news searching. It gets down to such a local level while also covering the major U.S. and international mainstream media. Now it’s adding blogs, according to its own blog . But not just any blogs, only those it thinks have “journalistic” value. The blog post about adding blogs has an interesting analysis of blogs versus mainstream media in terms of what types of information are covered. I need to do some more trial searches on the blogified Topix before I can decide whether this is useful for my information gathering purposes or not.