Can Microsoft out-innovate Google?

Microsoft announced today a round of updates to its Live Search offering. Searchengineland had a good story on the developments.

Microsoft, a late comer to the search engine game, has stepped up their pursuit of the number two spot, putting Google and Yahoo! on notice that they are serious about playing in this market.

Microsoft already has arguably the best image and video search of any of the big three and over the coming days and weeks they will be rolling out other updates. Will it be enough to start convincing people to give Live Search a chance?

I'll be curious to see how good it is once all the updates are rolled out. Search is the type of data and hardware intensive application that Microsoft excels at. I think they'll have much greater success than they will ever have with the Zune.

Does anyone out there think that Microsoft can catch Yahoo! or maybe some day even catch Google?