You may not know it yet but a things have changed quite a bit in the rarified air of search engine giants recently. With practically no media publicity Microsoft has launched a completely new engine. Well, perhaps completely new is stretching it a bit, presumably it is in fact an extension and re-branding of MSN.

At the new venture’s announcement in San Francisco, Bill Gates proclaimed this the era of “Live” software and bragged that Microsoft will play a major role in birthing a new generation of computing. Normally you would think an event like this would inspire the kind of promotional frenzy that leads to million dollar Super Bowl spots and Internet deluge but for some reason Microsoft has been curiously quiet on the matter.

Even its publicity department played down the significance on any announcement coming from the event before it happened. Long time industry watchers say the announcement was eerily similar to the occasion in December, 1995 when Gates let it casually slip that he was planning to devour Netscape and so began Microsoft dominance of online browsers and endless legal problems.

While much remains to be seen about how precisely the new services and site will differ from the existing ones but what is clear is that Microsoft has been taking a beating in recent years from Yahoo, Google, and online B2B services such as SalesForce. During the announcement Gates revealed plans to create two sets of web services, one for normal browsers, called Windows Live, and one for small businesses, called Office Live.

Windows Live will have many of the features that has made Yahoo so successful, including personalized pages and the ability to draw upon sources from all over the web to build those pages. It sure to change but you can take a look now if you like here.