Microsoft would finally be unveiling Kumo, upgraded version of Live search engine within a week.
Kumo is expected to simplify web searching by grouping results into categories.For e.g a search for music artist would yield results into categories like biography, lyrics, songs, albums etc.
Microsoft is banking on Kumo as it signals that it would be the biggest improvement till date and has been beta testing it with its employees. It bought Kumo.com (currently down), meaning “cloud” and “spider” in Japanese late last year.
Microsoft would also be planning a major advertising campaign to promote the new search engine and is said to have hired JWT. This is inline with recent advertising campaigns unleashed by Google chrome and Hulu.
Currently, the search market is dominated by Google with 64.2% market share whereas both Microsoft and Yahoo are seeing dwindling in their search marketshare which stands at paltry 8.2% and 20.4% respectively.
In the meanwhile Yahoo has also notified that it would be embedding new features to make its search engine much more than just 10 blue links and is also open to search partnership with Microsoft.
Microsoft this time wants to tear apart Google in what seems to be a last attempt in spoiling the party by starting afresh. This strategy may not prove thats useful as it has hardly been able to score some points of market share with many such feature introduction in past and also due to its current inability to gauge audience reaction by just testing it in-house.
Although embedding dread time saving features do not guarantee a larger audience but may invoke competition to outdo each other by improving online search experience for users and continue innovation in online search.
