The Rides and Tours

GOOGLE, the world's number one search engine, has lost its edge. That's the considered view of software engineers who have been testing an early version of Microsoft's MSN Search service, released last week. The quality of search offered by the Microsoft product will soon easily match that of Google, the experts say. And Yahoo's search engine already does, they add. Google is only top of the heap because of the "mindshare" it has garnered since it exploded onto the scene in 1998. "It's now more a perception issue that Google is the best," says Chris Sherman of the SearchEngineWatch website in Darien, Connecticut.