[KwasiOwusu]

"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."

MSN and Yahoo have already started gaining share in Internet search ,according to this very article.
And that is even before the real fight starts.

[Arthalion]

MSN and Yahoo have already started gaining share in Internet search ,according to this very article.

According to this very article, Google has seen a user base decline of .03% in the past year, which isn't so bad when you realize that the US Internet userbase as a whole declined by 1.1% last year, indicating that Googles percentage of marketshare was still increasing even while their userbase was shrinking. The market share increase seen by Yahoo and MSN has been ongoing for a few years now, and comes at the expense of portals like Lycos, Altavista, and Netscape.Com, which have ceased to be major players but users are still gradually drifting away from.

In other words, they're gaining users who are LOOKING for the "search portal" type systems that Yahoo, MSN, and other competitors have traditionally offered. Google users, for the most part, use their system because they want to avoid that clutter and the new MSN search won't appeal on those grounds.

As I said before, the new MSN search may be real competition for Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and the userbase interested in that type of site, but it isn't a direct threat to Google.