EngineWorks

As anticipated from an announcement earlier in the month, last week Microsoft launched its major update to Microsoft Live Search. The company is touting that its search engine is “faster and easier to use”. Not to be outdone, both Ask and Yahoo! announced significant improvements to there search engines as well.

In addition, Microsoft claims that they have quadrupled the size of their Live Search index. They expect this expansion, and their newly enhanced ranking algorithms, to generate highly relevant results. Also, they have stated that their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) load much faster than before this update.

Yahoo! claims that their new Yahoo! Search is designed to “better understand user intent and get consumers to the results they are looking for in one search”. They even make the audacious statement that their new search engine “makes Web search effortless for consumers”.

Of course, it remains to be seen if these expensive(!) enhancements will enable any one of these three search engines to gain ground on the G-Men from Menlo Park.