Then each went to his own home

Well, recently I searched on google for “foaf“, search results restricted to switzerland. And, surprise, my foaf was on rank 7.. Well, I suppose this won’t stay long like this, so here my screenshot:

Now we have three big web search sites:
MSN Search, Google, Yahoo, while Microsoft’s MSN Search is the latest competitor.

What is the big difference between the three search engines?
Sure, there are different page ranks, according to google-watch there is

on average only a 20 percent overlap between Yahoo’s first 100 results and Google’s first 100 results for the same search

And ok, there are different sites they are searching through.
But why is MSN doing more or less the same thing with huge efforts what google has already done? Yesterday I wanted to search all swiss companies that use/develop semantic web. I can’t search for that! (if you know a site doing that, let me know!). Now what they do is a giant race and some small search will come and eat them all. Why don’t they invent some new? Never heard of Semantic Web? Sure they have! So why are they are doing the same thing again and again? I don’t get it.