Bill Gates officially launches MSN Search on MSN.com's homepage:

Greetings,

I would like to introduce you to the new MSN Search service and MSN.com home page.

Based on your feedback, we have designed the new MSN.com home page to be faster, simpler, and more organized. We've also made MSN Search more precise and powerful, so you can quickly find the information you're looking for.

Our mission at Microsoft is to use the power of software to solve our customers' toughest problems. Searching the Internet today is a challenge, and it is estimated that nearly half of customers' complex questions go unanswered. That's why we're proud of our new MSN Search service, a simple and powerful tool that helps you find the answers you want from sources as diverse as Web pages, images, news headlines, music downloads, and even files on your PC.

Input from millions of our customers - including me - was crucial to our efforts to make MSN Search the best it can be. If you have not already tried it, I encourage you to visit www.msn.com and type in your question. We'd love to hear what you think, and I promise that we will continue to improve MSN based on your feedback.

Sincerely,

Bill Gates

Check out also the announcement by Christopher Payne (Corporate VP, MSN Search) on MSN Search blog:

I am proud and excited to announce that MSN Search is now officially launched.

With this final push we have made more than 40,000 Encarta encyclopedia articles and associated media available for free to MSN Search users, which translates to more than 1.5 million Instant Answers. We also improved and integrated Newsbot, added a button for RSS feeds on the bottom of all applicable search results pages, and increased our MSN Music selection.

We have been doing a ton behind the scenes over the last few weeks as well, tuning performance and working on scaling the system to handle MSN’s volume.

In conjunction with all this, MSN has launched a redesigned MSN.com homepage. The page is streamlined, over 50% faster and showcases the new search functionality. This will give users a great place to start their search experience. Furthermore we’ve added the ability to access MSN Search from the Microsoft.com homepage. What is most exciting to me is we now have a search platform in place that we can innovate on top of at a rapid pace. Thanks to all of you who provided feedback during the beta and tech previews ­ Keep it coming. The next year is going to be extremely exciting.

Thanks

To check your MSN search ranking (or your competitors ranking) you can use this ranking software