Described is estimating whether an online search query is a news-related query, and if so, outputting news-related results in association with other search results returned in response to the query. The query is processed into features, including by accessing corpora that corresponds to relatively current events, e.g., recently crawled from news and blog articles. A corpus of static reference data, such as an online encyclopedia, may be used to help determine whether the query is less likely to be about current events. Features include frequency-related data and context-related data corresponding to frequency and context information maintained in the corpora. Additional features may be obtained by processing text of the query itself, e.g., “query-only” features.