Well it’s about time…

Microsoft Is Set to Unveil Its Internet Search Service

It says in the article that this is a “long awaited” launch. I don’t know how long, but having watched the developments over a few sneak peeks at their “tech previews”, this should be very interesting.

The image of a lamb stumbling into wolfville to mind as it was apparent to me, looking at the last preview, that it’s pretty easy for webmasters to get sites listed with common SEO techniques. Stuff that worked well in Google two years ago seem to have some sites dominating the MSN search engine results page (SERPS). They can’t be that dumb, can they? Easy pickings is one way to get themselves lots of attention from webmasters, maybe the attention they need to unseat the 800 lb. Goooooorilla.

It’ll be interesting to see how the dichotomy of SEO techniques affects websites. If MSN search starts to increase it’s user base, webmasters will have to walk the line between what gets them listed in MSN and Google. For now, they appear to be very different things.

Competition is always good. Maybe this will give Google a kick in the pants to make it a bit easier to get sites into their search results, which has been the bane of webmasters for a year now.