While both MSN and Yahoo! have taken up most of their time catching up to Google, things are finally starting to get exciting. With it's announcement of Internet Explorer 7, new desktop search app and (ugly) upgrade to its MSN Search Microsoft is kick-starting it's fight for the web again while Yahoo! sneakily announces Y!Q a contextual search system that provides relevant links to pages being browsed (better explained here). All the while Google continues to innovate at a great pace. It will be interesting to see how things pan out. It is more or less certain that Google will release a (most likely) Gecko engine based browser while Microsoft will attempt to further integrate more into their applications while dodging law suits. Yahoo's future is less certain, while they enjoy a relatively large user-base they are vulnerable of losing it to MSN (OS/browser integration) or Google (street cred). I don't know how much Y!Q is going to help Yahoo! gain ground as it doesn't seem to have that "everybody wants this" feel that many of Google's releases have had. We shall see. To be honest I don't see how much longer we can go before web search becomes completely ubiquitous, built into every application, operating system, mobile phone, etc... This is what the consumer truly wants, not a site, a resident application or some sort of toolbar but a completely transparent contextual and integrated search system that does the job inside or outside the browser. Maybe a new feature of operating systems (desktop or mobile) should be "search engine of choice" where you can select to integrate your Windows XP with any search engine depending on who's results you prefer.