Microsoft plays around with search experiments, but still it is no game for Google and Yahoo. And it is not like the Redmond company is not trying. Back in 2006, Microsoft poured its search engine resources into the Ms. Dewey project. The alternative search mechanism was powered by Live Search; however, the real entertainment came courtesy of actress Janina Gavankar. Now Ms. Dewey, aka Janina Gavankar was also featured in a soft-porn role in the flick Cup of My Blood, a tad far from Oscar material, but I heard the movie will be worth your while, especially if you enjoyed searching accompanied by Ms. Dewey.

Fast forward to August 2007, and you will be able to find Microsoft animating search trees, also courtesy of Live Search, but with less skin, and porn in the equation, and with the introduction of Microsoft's Adobe Flash Killer: Silverlight. "Named for the Swahili term for research, Tafiti acknowledges that the search experience is going to get more specialized. Tafiti focuses in particular on people using search engines to do research. With built in facilities for making stacks of hand chosen web results, viewing them, and sharing them with others Tafiti starts to explore that space. There's even a "passive search consumption feature" or as we like to call it "a screensaver" that lets you explore a set of results deeply "hands free"," reveals a message from Jackson Fish Market, the design firm behind the visuals of Tafiti.

And yet, Microsoft is the eternal last in a three horse race against Google and Yahoo. At the beginning of this week, comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings delivered statistics for the month of July. Nielsen//NetRatings credits MSN and Live Search with 13.6%, Google with 53.3%, and Yahoo with 20.1% of the search engine market in the U.S. comScore managed to come up with similar results, giving Google 55.2%, Yahoo 23.5% and Microsoft just 12.3% of all the queries entered into search engines the past month.

The latest statistics from Internet metrics company Hitwise, reveal that there is even a bigger gap between Microsoft and its direct rivals on the search market. Of course that the result vary in accordance with the companies' different metrics mechanisms. According to Hitwise "Google accounted for 64.35 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending July 28, 2007. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 22.131, 8.79 and 3.21 percent respectively. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.52 percent of U.S. searches."