Microsoft recently announced that they're forming a couple of new lablets, Search and Live, the second under the direction of Gary Flake. Both labs are intended to better connect to the academic research community MS's research and business units focused on search and internet applications. They're even giving out some decent chunks of change, in the form of grants.
Here's one suggestion. Pay some one to port the MSN Search SDK into a form usable by the open source scripting languages: Python, Perl, Php, Ruby. As it is, you're stuck with a ridiculous inhale of MS dev tools if you just want to kick the tires and see how good or bad the dang thing is. Not good for adoption.
By the by, Live Labs looks like it has a nice collection of interesting researchers in place including Susan Dumais, Eric Horvitz, and Doug Terry. Then again, the full roster gives off a whiff of one of those university centers/programs where there's 40 affiliated faculty, 10 participate at all, and 5 do all the work.