SearchEngineLowdown culls from a Seattle Times article on MSN's search venture - failures, successes, ongoing developments: "MSN knew very little about building a search engine…[but] set an ambitious goal of indexing 5 billion Web sites. They unleashed their primitive crawler on the Internet, hoping to build a vast collection of Web pages that could be searched by an engine. But after a week, they were stuck at 24 documents."

Apparently, though, Microsoft's search engine now appears to be growing in use faster than Google. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, in the first quarter of 2005 Google's market share went from 47.1 percent to 47.3 percent, and MSN's went from 12.8 percent to 13.6 percent.

Some 500 engineers and marketers now constitute the MSN Search team, and a quarter of Microsoft's "high-powered" Beijing lab focuses on search and nothing but.