As mentioned this morning, MSN Search is to be launched Thursday. This obviously makes a big impact on the search engine optimization community, we have yet an other engine to 'optimize for.' But yet, there were many more search engines just a year or so ago - most of them were swallowed by Yahoo!.
Danny Sullivan has an excellent and detailed blog entry named MSN Search Technology To Debut (Again) This Week, where he takes you through a time line of "important announcements and releases in Microsoft's progress toward having its own search engine." A must read, if I may say so.
I still believe that Microsoft will win the battle of the search wars, if you are interested in the logic I used to come to such a conclusion, please read my entry named Relevancy's Importance in Microsoft's Quest. After all, Microsoft is still a bit ticked off with Google for de-listing microsoft.com back in May 2003.
Other forum coverage not mentioned earlier: