In the last week of October I wrote about Goggles desktop search engine and Microsoft's efforts to match it. Well this week Microsoft has released its beta version of their answer to Google. Don't be surprised that the pages look similar. The official version will be ready by years end.

Microsoft's grand plan calls for a desktop search for emails, local files, and the web.Microsoft wants a product that will let its users easily search across local machines, corporate networks and the Internet. The Microsoft approach with "Stuff I've seen" will use the memory on the local computer to search through previous past queries and the data on your local hard drive to better determine your personal preferences, Sapphire, another Microsoft approach to search technology will track everything a user does on his/her computer, store the data and correlate it to personal search preferences.

The beta version of MSN search is at http://beta.search.msn.com/ The beta version of Microsoft's search engine does not have the number of update crawlers that Google employs. The pages are dated, the new Microsoft engine does not employ a cache, one of Google's most useful features. With a cache, you can load pages that have been taken off-line, recently changed, or served from a sluggish server; this is a must-have element in any competitive search engine if it intends to surpass Google.