I submited my site to MSN, Google, Yahoo and the rest the same day. That was almost 7 months ago. Using my primary keyword my site took to appear as follow. MSN: 6 days. Google: 5 weeks Yahoo: 9 weeks Thats a big difference in time.
exams, there is a difference between crawling and indexing. Googlebot finds your site as fast if not faster than MSN but it crawls only when it finds a few backlinks and usually indexes (i.e results appearing in serps) after a month or so for a fresh new site. The exact alchemy behind google's crawling and indexing is unknown but it's usually related to the number of links it finds and the date since its bot first hit your site. This is usually 5 weeks according to what i've observed.
It is different case for me. 4 weeks past already, MSN shows plenty of backlinks to my website but does not index my site yet. So weird. Number of days to get my site indexed. MSN: - Google: 1 day Yahoo: 1 week
I found out that if you post a link on a blog at blogspot.com (any blog) you get indexed quite quickly by Google as they own it.