According to the King County Journal, as , the new software development office will employ up to 200 workers.

The Silicon Valley company recently signed a multiyear lease to initially occupy the entire fourth floor of the Central Way Plaza building at 720 Fourth Ave. in downtown Kirkland.

Google also agreed to take an option to occupy the third floor of the building as well by the end of November 2006, which would give the company a total of 46,000 square feet of office space.

The company has only about a dozen workers in the Puget Sound region at a couple of small sales offices -- one at Kirkland's Carillon Point and one in Seattle's South Lake Union area.

Eileen Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for Google at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., confirmed in an e-mail the company's plans to open a software development office in Kirkland, but was unable to provide details regarding hiring plans here.

What's going to make the difference between the 3 Search giants Google, Yahoo! and MSN?

• All of them have a search engine with a design more and more similar...
• All of them have a blog (MSN just opened its blog)
• All of them have a toolbar
• All of them try to have the bigger index
• and so on...

Maybe the users will make their choice, mainly based on relevance.