Latest Nielsen report on first 15 search engines user reach in December reveals the warm-up of the top search engines war.

Even more than that, it seems that the beginning of the year opened up new war fields, in what would be Search Engine War V.

As such, Google launched its Google Maps, Google Video Search, and also worth be mentioned the latest huge wave of Gmail invitations available. (Don’t forget also, the speculations that Google wants tto host Wikipedia to compete with MSN Search’s Encarta content and Yahoo, which accesses the Columbia Encyclopedia.)

Meanwhile, Yahoo included its Yahoo!Video Search in its frontpage and launched some beta tools: Yahoo!Contextual Search, Firefox Toolbar and Yahoo!Desktop Search.

We shouldn’t forget as well, the coming out of beta of MSN Search Engine which is accompanied by Microsoft’s biggest online campaign ever, with TV, print and outdoor placements in 25 countries. If we add to all these AskJeeves’s launch of MyJeeves beta, recent aquire of Bloglines as well as its plans to spend more than 40 percent more on marketing in 2005 than it did last year it’s obvious that we’re having a full war going on here.

UPDATE: Things happen as we speak on this subject. After the all-around spreaded rumours of a potentially Mozilla-Google collaboration that, after all, ended up with key Mozilla volunteers working now for Google, and the browser showcases Google search in its interface there’s it seems that Ask Jeeves and the Mozilla Foundation have begun discussions on the twin possibilities of a Firefox-based Jeeves browser and of donating Jeeves’ desktop search technology to the open-source grou. (via CNet News.com Ask Jeeves mulls Firefox-based browser)