Well it's not perfect, but MSN's newly enhanced search engine offering is definitely offering up its own brand of "relevant" results. That's not a bad thing as long as those results get users to the most useful and accurate information available.

MSN seems to be doing just that with their latest offering based on the test drive that I gave it last night. Although, still in the beta stage as of Tuesday night, MSN allowed users to preview by visiting live.com; A site Microsoft launched back in November of 2005 to boost its "Windows Live" offerings.

The first search that I did was for a college sports team that I take an interest in: "Texas A&M Aggies". The results were not what I was looking for at all. Although there weren't any obvious "spam" sites in the top five, the first few results directed me to sites that were only loosely associated with the Texas A&M University, much less its athletic program. In fact, position #4 was occupied by a site that dealt with southwestern cooking tips!

Still, MSN's new and improved engine offered very Google-like results in terms of featuring authority content sites with fresh content, but also offered a slightly different spin on the top five search results. It's was refreshing to see, because it seemed like the previous incarnation of MSN search was nothing more than a Google emulator.

This is definitely a step in the right direction for Bill Gates as he tries to catch up in what seems to be a hopelessly uncompetitive race between Microsoft and its two main rivals, Google, Inc. and Yahoo, Inc. This is currently a race in which both Google and Yahoo are lapping the software giant, but MSN has not let up on the accelerator just yet.