Looks like MSN is beginning to win the search engine wars according to John Batelle.

"SEW points to YAS (yet another study) which shows that MSN wins in an unscientific relevance test. One would not want to generalize to the billions of results (and infinite queries) that search provides, but if you’re looking for insurance quotes in Ohio, brother, you’re golden".

MSN is attacking Google in several areas at the same time.

     1. Better search results
     2. MSN AdCenter offerings including Superior GeoDemographic research     and targeting
     3. IE7 search box defaulting to MSN
     4. Windows Live.

In two years, MSN and Google may be about equal in influence - a lot can happen in two years.