For the last several years, MSN has been getting its search results from other companies. As of late, they've been getting their results from Yahoo! So, it you got into Yahoo, then you would show up in MSN. They displayed a little differently and might be in a bit of a different order, but they were essentially the same results. But things are changing.

For the last year or so MSN has been putting together search results of their own. They are in Beta testing now and could be using their own results within the first quarter of 2005. They are going after Google as the leader in the search engine world, which I'm not sure will happen. MSN is certainly putting a lot of money, people and time into. I was contacted a couple weeks ago to consider a job in Redmond helping out with their search engine marketing, but I'm content to stay here in Denver.

I'm dubious that they'll take over Google as an industry leader. They may put a dent in their market, but I think Google is too focused to be beaten at this time. MSN has a lot of other things going on--software, operating systems, internet service provider, etc. Google just concentrates on search.