I just noticed a lot more traffic coming from LIVE. I went and took a look and what do you know they redesigned the engine....The search results look better to...I don't see what I use to see....3 or 4 sites ranking on first page with subdomains and sloppy looking results...It actually looks really nice and clean.. What does this mean for Google? Well prolly nothing in the near future but hey Microsoft are proven winners (at somethings) and when they put $ behind their product you just never know what might happen. They definitely have a really nice ad network that is super targeted, plus if they sell a few more million Vista's and keep moving forward with the Engine you just never know. But I'll tell you they will definitely pass Yahoo for market share thats a guarantee!
They still aren't allowing the use of the link: operator. Any word on whether MS is releasing a full API for the LIVE search engine? One thing I noticed: they've cranked down the algo variable for domain name power. A domain name of abc-xyz.com doesn't automatically rank in the top 3 for the keyword "abc xyz". Also, two pretty good keywords that I ranked #1 for in LIVE are now at #3 and #15 respectively (both still #1 at Yahoo and #3 and #6 in Google). So they have made a major update. Its still going to be a hard uphill fight for them.