Posts Tagged ‘Kumo’
Yahoo-Microsoft-Bid-Update
In the ongoing saga of Microsoft’s continued attempts to buyout Yahoo!, Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft has come out publicly saying he still wants to buy Yahoo’s search company.
In a recent interview by AllThingsD with Balmer at this week’s 2009 Media Summit this week in New York, Balmer has said that Microsoft has made a significant investment in Research & Development into Search, which is something Google has clearly led the way in, but he believes Yahoo isn’t in a position to make such an investment.
Balmer believes that by combining Live Search with Yahoo’s search, the company will pool it’s resources, customers and advertisers together to add scale, and he seems to think therein lies the real value of merging the two businesses, with a goal of holding 15-20% of the search market in the next few years.
Balmer declined to comment on the new Kumo Search product, but did go on to say that search was updated at Microsoft every 9 months.
Microsoft Kumo in Testing
Microsoft is currently testing “Kumo“, the internal project name used by Microsoft employees for it’s new search function which is said to not only provide an improved search feature, but also help users “accomplish tasks”.
Microsoft report that around 40% of all search queries go unanswered, and Satya Nadella, VP of Microsoft’s Online Service group claims that 46% of search queries last longer than 20 minutes, suggesting that the user has difficulty finding what it is they’re looking for, and 50% of queries are users returning to previous tasks.
One has to wonder if this is a flaw common amongst all search engines, or if perhaps Microsoft’s existing search engine isn’t delivering qualitative data, or grading it and ranking it in the SERPs accordingly.
In comparison to Google, it is said by most Search Engine Marketers, that you need to be at the top spot in the Search Engine Results Pages, or at least on the first pages. Google seems to present instant gratification, and their strategy is to keep users on the page for as little time as possible and get on with doing or viewing what it is they were searching for.
Perhaps a change in Microsoft’s algorithms delivered by Kumo may present a new way for searching and finding information on the web, and we can only watch and wait to see if they’re able to acheive that goal and re-gain some market share against the leading search giant, Google.
Yahoo! in Microsoft’s sites again
Microsoft still seems determined to swallow up Yahoo!, amid talks that the world’s largest software maker is waiting to strike up a deal when Yahoo! appoints a new CEO.
This news comes shortly after Microsoft snapped up a senior member of Yahoo! (Dr Qi Lu) to head up the Online Services Group.
The deal would certainly be in the interest of Yahoo! Inc shareholders, who would be devastated over the substantial write-down of their shares after they dropped 56% from a high of $USD 30.00 in February 2008, when Microsoft first made the proposition to buyout Yahoo! in effort to have a combined marketshare of approximately 30% of the search business to pose a formidable force against the dominant Google Inc.
Microsoft needs to take some drastic measures to improve it’s search business and lift it’s market share from approximately 8.5%, or risks falling by the wayside as a minor search engine with a small enthusiast following, the likes of Lycos and Altavista.
There are still rumours circulating to suggest that Microsoft is soon going to re-badge it’s Live service to the new name of “Kumo” as reported by SearchNews early last month, and a spokesperson from Microsoft revealed that Live Search “hasn’t made it (live.com) stand for something that consumers have connected to”.
This Search Engine News Article brought to you by SearchKing.
Microsoft to rename search portal Kumo
It wasn’t long ago that some of us were doing searches in “MSN”, The Microsoft Network Search portal, but that brand that was originally Microsoft’s internet division seemed to be over-used, and sometimes confusing through various re-badged portals forged out of alliances between Microsoft and media outlets such as NBC (MSNBC), Channel Nine in Australia (ninemsn) and others, and so in 2007, Microsoft made a push for live.com to be it’s new flagship brand for search.
Microsoft’s Live brand seems to have outgrown search, and is labeled to a variety of it’s services, and the search for a new name may have been underway.
A recent article found on a blog site Microsoft has reported that the name Kumo has been suggested as the new name for Microsoft’s search portal.
There have already been issues with the naming rights for kumo.com, and the name had already been filed in the US Patent and Trademark office, so it may turn out that we’ll never put searches through Kumo.
One has to wonder how many more name changes Microsoft’s lesser used search portal will undergo before they settle on the one name permanently.