I am a Masters student in Computer Science with interest in Data
Mining, Information Retrieval and Web Search.  Currently, I have two
offers for a Software Engineer position from MSN Search and Yahoo
Search and I am finding it really difficult to choose one of them.

Yahoo Search : Position is in the inktomi's webmap team, where I need
to build distributed systems to store and maintain a billion-node
webgraph and develop efficient graph-traversal and link analysis
algorithms on it.

MSN Search : Position is in developing efficient document clustering
algorithms, metrices for measuring Web Index Quality etc.

Yahoo Search is offering 80K with 4500 Stock Options.
MSN Search is offering 85K with 330 Stock awards. 

Which of these two teams has a better talent pool so that I can get a
chance to learn ? And which of these two teams would give me a better
scope for my contributions or innovations ? And finally which one of
them is a better team to join taking all factors into picture.

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Clarification of Question by setu-ga on 10 Aug 2004 15:28 PDT

Please list all the pros and cons of joining the two companies
including the pros and cons of the locations, salary, stock options
and awards.