by SEO Consultant
J. Cave
J. Cave
According to an allegedly leaked email, Microsoft is currently running internal testing on Kumo, a possible re-brand of Live Search. Senior Vice President of Research and Development, Satya Nadella, has asked Microsoft staff to test the new search engine with the aim of "redirecting internal live.com traffic over to the site in the coming days".
Rumours of a possible Live Search re-brand began when Barney Pell, a Microsoft Executive, mentioned such a move on Twitter. Although he did take the post down within a few hours, the gossip had already spread across the blogosphere.
Kumo, which is Japanese for "cloud" or possibly "spider", has not received much praise from most news sites that have covered the story, at least from a design perspective. But while Microsoft may have failed to reel in users from an aesthetic point of view, it's possible that it has focused all of its energies on the performance of the search engine, particularly in the field of semantic search.
Last year, Microsoft bought semantic search engine Powerset for a figure in the region of $100 million, bringing founder Barney Pell onto the Microsoft team.
Since the acquisition, Powerset has been seen as Microsoft's final attempt to take on the might of Google. Unlike most modern search engines, which try to match a search query with keywords on a result page or within the anchor text linking to the page, Powerset looks at natural language processing elements. These elements consider the intent of the search rather than simply matching the keywords with webpages that feature the query.
Satya Nadella's email focuses not so much on a possible re-brand but on how Microsoft can meet the needs of users. His email addresses some of the shortcomings of today's search engines. In particular, he mentions that nearly 40 per cent of queries go unanswered and 46 per cent of search sessions last longer than 20 minutes. Perhaps this is where Powerset's aim to understand the natural language elements of a search will come in, though the service is still in its infancy.
If there is to be a Live Search re-brand or even re-launch, it is unlikely that it will be focused on Kumo's design interface. Instead, it seems more likely that Microsoft has found a way to integrate Powerset into its search algorithm and that it is testing it on staff before a major public announcement.
