My daughter is in the second grade and she had this homework assignment. She had about five questions and the instructions were to use Google to find the answers. Guess what - Google failed the test. Using a natural language query, Ask was the only search engine (Google and Yahoo tried first) to consistently return the correct answer on the first page.
If I had to rank them:
Ask
Yahoo
Google
Sorry to MSN, but I thought Ask might be better with this type of query.
Totally unscientific, but it worked for me.