A Google executive downplayed the looming threat of search competition from Microsoft, saying his company doesn’t expect to see a credible product from the software giant for years.

“Rather than worry about some big promise coming down five years from now, we need to focus on innovation now,” Salar Kamangar, product development director at Google, said Wednesday on a panel at Stanford Business School’s first annual technology conference.

His comments came only a week after Microsoft’s MSN outlined plans for its own next-generation Internet search engine, the first version of which will launch later this year. The company also is developing search technology for Longhorn, the next version of the Windows operating system, which will allow people to search documents, as well as various applications like e-mail and the Web, all from their desktop. Plans for Longhorn are slated to come to fruition in 2006.

Meanwhile, Google is making a play of its own for desktop search. Late last year, it began testing a desktop search application that lets people find information from the Internet without a Web browser. The company also recently announced that it will offer free, Web-based e-mail, a move that some industry watchers say is just a step away from a Google desktop service.

“Will Google’s new, free e-mail system, Gmail, be just the first of many things we’ll see in a new Google desktop? If so, Microsoft could have a lot more to worry about than just Web search,” search engine pundit Danny Sullivan wrote in his Search Engine Watch newsletter this week.

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