The current talk in the search engine world these days generally involves speculation around the raging war between Google and Microsoft and their battle for supremacy. But tucked into a lower orbit is Yahoo’s quest to become a media company and they’re putting together a top-notch news portal in the process.

The list of financial columnists they’ve added beside Suzy Orman includes “Anyone? Anyone?” Ben Stein, Daniel Pink, David Bach and several others. The columnists will offer financial and economic advice on a variety of different subjects.

Then comes “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone.”

Kevin Sites has worked for CNN for a while now as a war correspondent and posts to a blog for Yahoo from whatever war zone he happens to be in at the time. Currently, Sites is located in Somalia and blogs on various things he sees and does. The blog’s first welcoming message happened on yesterday.

Yahoo said in this in the first post:

From most locations, Kevin will file a daily dispatch on a different aspect of the conflict. Normally, Kevin’s dispatches will be available shortly after he files them. For security reasons, we chose not to publish his first set of dispatches while he was still in Somalia. Instead, all this week you’ll be seeing coverage he prepared last week; you’ll find live coverage next week.

What Yahoo has up its sleeve next for multimedia content is unknown. One can certainly expect to see more original news content added to their listings. This will be in addition to the various television programming and other original content they may add.

Some noteworthy coverage includes the recent Discovery mission back in July and the premiere of Kirstie Alley’s new program on the Showtime network.

John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.