Microsoft put itself on a collision course with rivals yesterday by launching a new Internet tool to win business away from Yahoo and Google.
The computer giant has created its own search engine, MSN Search, to try to entice online advertisers.

Microsoft has run the service on a trial basis for some months before launching the full version.

In Britain, it replaces msn.co.uk, run through Yahoo, which gave it just 10 percent of Bbritish search engine hits.
That is a distant second behind google, which is used for almost two-thirds of searches on the web.

Microsoft has given users the ability to ask a specific questions such as "What is the capital of Peru?".
The answers are provided by an online version of its Encarta encyclopaedia, which has 1.4 million entries.
However, Ask Jeeves said its search engine had been answering specific queries like that since 2003.

Metro put the new Microsoft search engine to the test yesterday against its rivals Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves.
When asked 'Who is Peter Doherty?', it first listed the official website of the singer's former band The Libertines.
But Google did best, listing the website of his new band, Babyshambles.
Yahoo first listed an NME article on the singer from last year, while Ask Jeeves found an eBay sale of CDs.

Matt Whitingham, of MSN Infomation Services, said: "Consumers were wowed by entering an obscure search and getting thousands of results. Now the want search engines to be smarter."

A Google spokesman said: "It's nice to see that people have recognised the quality of search as well.