Live search from MSN or Kumo
Microsoft has been eyeing search advertising domain for quite sometime. Its failed attempt to gobble up Yahoo with $44.6 billion bid, had raised eyebrows in early 2008. But had the bid been successful, Microsoft & Yahoo combine still would not have been able to dethrone Google from its citadel. Google is sitting pretty smartly with 63% market share. (Courtesy comScore)
Google’s market share has gone north steeply over last one year and during the same period Microsoft’s share has been almost steady. Google has employed innovative techniques to improve its search results. As per January 2009 statistics, Google sites dominate the search space with 63% market share. Yahoo sites are distant second at 21% and Microsoft sites are holding mere 8.5% market share.
Microsoft has eyed acquisition of many search products in past including Yahoo to enhance its presence in search space.
Kumo is expected to new search product from Microsoft’s stable and is expected to be rolled out later this year. Kumo is a Japanese term and means either “Spider” or “Cloud”.
Many tech blogs have come out with news report mentioning “Internal Search testing at Microsoft” for their new search product. Even Twitter was on fire after a tweet by Powerset co-founder, Barney Pell on re-branding of new search product from Microsoft, caught the attention of blogosphere. Incidentally Powerset was taken over by Microsoft last year and Pell works with Microsoft in search domain.
Kumo or may be some other named search offering from Microsoft, will have to be really good to face Google in this search domain. Yahoo may also be re-strategizing its search products and we may have all three upping their ante for garnering more and more share.
For us, the users, more the merrier.
May also like to read:
