News 

Microsoft is preparing to launch two new products - a search engine capable of competing with Yahoo! and Google - and a desktop search tool. The desktop search product is slated to be released later this year.

Yesterday Bill Gates fuelled speculation when he told shareholders, 'We have a lot of new things coming

Currently MSN Search is powered by the Yahoo! database but has made no secret of wanting to strike out with its own search technology. The company is said to have earmarked some $100 million in order to develop a product that can match Google and Yahoo!. CEO Steve Ballmer has ruefully admitted that Google had 'kicked our butts' over search

In February of this year Microsoft unveiled a beta search product based on results from its own MSNBot spider which has steadily improved as the months have gone by. The busy MSN spider is now said to have harvested around five billion pages, which puts it in the same kind of order of magnitude as its competitors. However, the Search Technology Preview at the MSN Sandbox is at the moment unavailable, presumably getting some kind of overhaul.