New York — Microsoft touched headlines at the end of last year when it snatched up just about every domain name variant with “Kumo” in it, has now broaden the testing of its next-generation search technology publicly.
For the past two months, Microsoft has been running an internal test of the technology, which is code-named Kumo, its weapon against super search engine Google.
Microsoft’s existing search engine is the Live Search engine. However, it seems that the company intends on replacing the outdated engine with something a bit more competitive to what Google has been offering.
According to recent reports which indicates that apart from some of the design changes that are part of that update the software giant may be gearing up to release its new search engine for public testing.
According to reports from cnet news, an ardent admirer Ryan Rea last week said that he has been randomly getting a Live Search result page that looks similar to what has been shown by Microsoft as screenshots of Kumo than it does to Microsoft’s standard search results. In particular is the left-hand navigation pane, a key feature of Kumo.
Rea said he started getting the new results using Live Search in “Internet Explorer 8” using the release candidate build of Windows 7. However, even with the mentioned setup the search page pops up randomly to a small group of users.
Microsoft informed CNET News that Rea’s result page is part of the company’s testing efforts.
“We are continuously exploring ways to improve Live Search for both advertisers and consumers,” the software maker said in a statement. “As part of that effort, we regularly conduct public tests of certain feature sets. This is an example of one such test with a very limited audience.”
Kumo, however, is designed to include more than just changes to the look of Microsoft’s search engine. Among the various enhancements, Kumo seems to offer something similar to what is presently provided by Google. Kumo has the capability to take search keywords and filter results according to specific categories. Also, Kumo is apparently more than a layout change as it is expected to be the inclusion of semantic search technology Microsoft acquired as part of last year’s purchase of Powerset.
Microsoft is determined to take the search engine battle to the next level by acquiring a company and developing a new search engine from scratch. Microsoft at present claims about 10.3 percent of the search engine market, with 15.8 percent from Yahoo and 64.2 percent from Google.
The company with all odds has a long way to go to combat Google, but Kumo looks to be a step in the right direction. Users may be able to encounter Kumo over the next few months as the company is planning on expanding its public test trials.