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This is the start of a marathon, not a sprint. We will see.

Granted, but my money is on Google (figuratively, their stock is way too overhyped right now to put it there literally).

In one corner, you have Google, a company that believes in doing one thing and doing it well. Their entire company is dedicated to a single cause...to make search better, faster, and to get users off their site as quickly as possible.

In the other corner you have MSN Search, a site that tries to be everything to everybody. Its design is a compromise, and as such isn't nearly up to par with Google's in the areas of simplicity, usability, and performance. Even if MSN matches Googles search results quality, Google will still have the upper hand in these areas. MSN's ONLY advantage at this point is the search localization feature, which is useless for AOL users (still the largest single user block on the Internet), only midly useful for most of the rest of the Internet, and which Google has no doubt already begun writing a competitor for.

It'll be an interesting race to watch, and search users will no doubt be the biggest beneficiaries, but I have to place odds on the company with the proven track record in this area, and not on the company who's search track record is so punctuated by failure that they actually gave up and leased their competitors technology for years.