Search engines are a bit like pets.

Losing your favourite one can cost you dearly, yet frequently you forget it is there.

Often getting the most out of it requires more effort than it seems to be worth, and so you fall into bad habits. (The sentiment behind “I couldn't be bothered to walk him today", for instance, is reflected in the compulsion to bash whichever keywords seem most relevant into the white box, click 'search', and then trawl through page upon page of results, rather than refining the query.)

Finally there is the almost tribal allegiance to breeds. ("If you want me to trial another search engine, I'm going to make sure to cross-check with Google for truth," a colleague said this week.)

Given all this inertia, then, does Microsoft stand a chance of clawing market share off Google with the search on its revamped Live.com? And who, if anyone, will jump ship?

Search experts tend to rate engines according to two criteria - 'precision', which refers to the number of documents returned where a particular phrase occurs, and 'recall', which is the fraction of those documents which are relevant to the query.

A big trend of the moment is towards "disambiguating queries" - ascertaining the meaning of the search terms, so that irrelevant material can be excised. Yahoo! recently adapted its service in the US so that when a user starts typing in a query, a list of suggested terms appears below the search box, guessing at their intent. Ask.com introduced a similar feature a while back.

"The only real way to evaluate the quality of results, though, is taste," Drew Broomhall, Times Online's search editor, says. "Is there a reasonable spread? Is there too much focus on one area? How does it respond to different types of queries?"

So, how does Live.com - which currently performs just under 7 per cent of searches in the UK, in comparison with Google's 77 per cent - stack up?

First up, let's sample a couple of what we might call 'background' queries - on topics that aren't, at least on face value, affected by the 'news agenda' or commercial considerations.

Here, more than anywhere, there is parity between Live.com and its main rival. A search on 'haute savoie cheese' on Live throws up, on its front page: two entries from Wikipedia - neither of which are particularly helpful, a couple from a site called wiki-travel, which are more about visiting the region rather than cheese, and then - mid-way down - a very informative site 'Specialities of the Savoie'.

Google also plumps for the 'Savoie specialties' site, and supplements it with more general sites about produce from the Savoie. Two French Government sites about why Evian was chosen as the venue for the G8 summit in 2003 are a lapse, however, as are a couple of opportunistic accommodation sites. A New York Times article about how to make a tartiflette is a nice change of pace, though. All in all not a great deal to differentiate the two.