Kumo (Live) Search’s Homepage to be

A couple of days ago, I talked to you about Kumo, Microsoft’s rebranding of Live Search.  Here is a picture of what the homepage will potentially look like.  Cosmetically, it looks the same as Live Search, but I’m not going to make the mistake of criticizing it and regretting it later.  We only see the face, what is underneath is more important.  We will just have to wait and see, but I’m hoping for a Google-Killer.

Microsoft’s Second Try at Search

Several years ago Microsoft realized that there was a computer related market that they did not dominate: search.  They immediately moved to unseat the ruling and undisputed leader in search, Google.  They introduced Live Search and the Windows Live suite of products to do just that.

Overall, Live search has a 8.5% market share of US searches (Jan 2009)  and 1.73% international market share (Feb 2009).  Not all that great.

Recently, news has come out that Microsoft will rebrand and re-release it’s search engine.  The name, sources discovered, will be Kumo.  In fact, Microsoft Netherlands released a screenshot.  They also stated that Kumo would work with the Web Slices function in IE8.  (I will comment on this at a later time.)

It will be interesting to see what actually comes out of this name change.  Hopefully it goes better than Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo for it’s search capabilities.