Holy escalation, Batman, when is this all going to end? It's getting down to hand-to-hand combat in the search wars, as The Mercury News picks up on Microsoft's plans for a new weblog search service slated for later this fall and Redmond's nascent answer to Google News, dubbed NewsBot. No real specifics on the weblogs service, other than that it's going to be selective (yes, that's good...), but of equal interest is the maturity of NewsBot, which offers both preset pages and a search tool, similar in scope and effect to Google's well-established beta news service and Yahoo!'s new news service. Overall results in quick tests are pretty good in terms of search relevance, we'll be testing it in more detail over the next few weeks. While I am sure that Google has some concerns about this increased competition, if I am a major news portal, I have to be very worried about these developments. Automated news aggregation is poised to become the default "front page" for a new generation of maturing online readers, providing a level of objectivity in news gathering that editor-guided news services cannot replicate easily. Newspapers still presume the printing press as the central argument of their editorial powers, but the quickly evolving powers of Web search and content presentation tools are becoming the central news gathering metaphor very quickly. Not time yet to short your New York Times or Gannett stock just yet, but it's a quickly evolving landscape that's just begun to get interesting.