by SEO Consultant
R. Falconer
Has bigmouthmedia been among the first to spot referrals from MSN's new search domain kumo.com? As we reported last month, Microsoft has been internally testing its new search engine, Kumo, which is expected to be released later this year. The referrals we found suggest that there may be some degree of public testing going on too.R. Falconer
The referral, found on Google Analytics, comes from http://www.kumo.com / search, suggesting that this is organic traffic. The person looked at 3 pages over 11 minutes which suggests someone actually using the search engine rather than just testing it.
A screenshot which was leaked last month and published by cnet among others, shows that Kumo has a clean interface with a three column design, rather than the current standard two columns used by all the major search engines.
The new column, on the left appears to be a list of similar, semantically related searches. This is, no doubt, an implementation of Microsoft's purchase last year of semantic search engine, Powerset and looks to be the most interesting element of the new search engine. The best way for a search engine to increase its market share is by providing the best results for users. Google has always known this and there are suggestions that Microsoft is catching on. Providing meaningful and relevant suggestions for other search queries could give Kumo (or whatever it ends up being called) a boost by providing functionality that other search engines don't provide. If they could manage to implement some form of real time search before Twitter search is fully operational, they'd be on a winner there too.
There are rumours galore on the web about the launch of Kumo, one of the main ones being the amount of money Microsoft is willing to throw at marketing it. You can read anything between $100 Million and $500 Million on the web but even $500 million would be small change if Kumo somehow managed to double the amount users currently using MSN / Live.
Expect the Kumo hype to build over the coming weeks and months. Search needs more competition to shake things up a bit, let's hope Microsoft can bring something new to the table.
