The stakes of the game involve money � more money than most of us can imagine � but that's only the half of it � reputation and the number one spot are the true goals. Around a year ago, MSN's attack on the search market became inevitable with the launch of its own search index and crawler tools. Then a few months ago they began testing their new paid search advertising tool "AdCenter" with its launch in English in Singapore and later in French for the French market. The idea was to iron out the bugs and prepare to do battle in the key markets of the US and the UK. If you were a venture capitalist, you might be prepared to launch and run a search engine these days just to claim some share of the rising market � and make some money. European search engine, Seekport, is doing just that. But this is Microsoft and Bill Gates we're talking about. From monolith of the PC world, to also-ran in search, Microsoft is seething with anger at not being taken seriously enough in the search market. A large marketing spend to promote MSN search moved its market share by a barely measurable percentage. It improved and invested further in its search technology � but still everyone turned to Google from choice. The team at MSN are visibly frustrated by their lack of progress at uprooting Google and the apparently blind loyalty of Google users. Representatives of the company could barely mask their frustration at the recent webmasterworld conference in Las Vegas. Quite clearly, they feel that users and search marketers have not given MSN the credit it deserves for progress.