Microsoft Kumo Search moving ahead

Microsoft has been looking to make an entry into the Google dominated Search Market for the last few years. They famously made an $45+ billion bid (Its probably good that the bid did not go through at that time as the markets tanked after that) to take over Yahoo more than a year ago—and a large part of Microsoft's interest in the Internet giant was its search business, which is second only to Google in market share. Google accounts for roughly two thirds of the Internet search market and growing, Yahoo accounts for about 20 percent, and Microsoft and players like AOL and Ask.com fight for the rest. Although Microsoft would still like to do a deal of some sort with Yahoo and would like to take over only the search business rather than Yahoo's entire operation—the Redmond company is putting together a plan B.

Microsoft has launched internal testing on an update to its Live Search product, codenamed Kumo, currently available only within the company's internal network. We have been covering the developments on Kumo for the last few months and now it finally seems that the product is ready for internal demo to the engineers and product managers at Microsoft.

The new Microsoft Kumo Search service is positioned to help users "accomplish tasks" rather than merely click on search results. The service features an explorer pane on the left side of the results listings with related search terms and tools to help users refine or manage their search; search refinement features vary with searches, so one search might offer links to let users see related images and videos, while another might emphasize related links and businesses.

The search results listings also attempt to organize results into clear categories, where possible and the ordering of the categories might mean that the thing a search user most wants is shuffled to the bottom of the pack. And, of course, the listings features sponsors links and text-based ads—because there's no point in offering a search service unless Microsoft can sell it to advertisers. Kumo also features a session history so users can easily find and return to previous search hits.

So are the users going to look at categories and a complicated dashboard of options to find their way through the network. This is something that only time will tell. Microsoft will have to make some significant wins in the blogging and early users community to get the momentum going. Offering this to the current Live Search users is not going to help Kumo in any ways.

So the big question now is when will Kumo Search Launch? Watch this space for more.