As somebody who's building his career around Microsoft, I feel I should do things the "Microsoft" way, which means, among other things, using Microsoft Live Search instead of Google. Unfortunately for Microsoft, this isn't working. I wanted to know how to turn on tracing in IBM's XMS for .NET library (see http://geekswithblogs.net/.NETonMyMind/archive/2007/04/04/110775.aspx). Entering "ibm xms trace" (without the quotes) in Live Search resulted in a collection of useless links that just happen to have those words. Entering the exact same thing in Google shows the page in the IBM documentation that I needed as the first link. I've had similar results with other searches.
There's no way Microsoft can catch up with Google. Even if they make their results as good (or even better) than Google's, they've lost the mind share battle. Their only hope is to surpass Google. How? Right now, there's a gap between what people want and what they get. People want answers, not lists of links. If I query "When was Shostakovich born?" I should get back September 25, 1906, not a list of links. Microsoft needs to develop artificial intelligence software that turns the vast pile of stuff that is the internet into answers.