Where is the scorching competition leading Google and Microsoft? How bad is the battle among major search engines?

Richard Waters, in his article Google calls for more limits on Microsoft, wrote:
Google on Monday called on a judge to extend part of the US government's four-year antitrust scrutiny of Microsoft, intensifying a lobbying battle in which the arch-rivals have sought to limit each other's power.

Google went over the heads of justice department and state regulators to appeal directly to a federal judge to impose greater restrictions on the software company. However, Microsoft's lawyers claimed the approach was part of an untested procedure that fell outside the judge's remit. Google's intervention follows Microsoft's appeal to the Federal Trade Commission in April to block its rival's planned purchase of advertising technology company DoubleClick.

Google's latest legal salvo comes a week after Microsoft appeared to have put the dispute over desktop search to rest. In a report to the court last week, US antitrust regulators said they were satisfied with changes Microsoft had proposed to its desktop search.

"In theory, there's certainly justification for the court to listen to complaints like the one from Google," said Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association of Competitive Technology, a group that has typically sided with Microsoft. However, he added that regulators had investigated Google's complaint and he called its intervention now "a PR stunt".

Microsoft said it had gone "the extra mile to resolve these issues in a spirit of compromise", and added: "The government clearly showed it is satisfied with the changes we are making."