Microsoft made headlines late last year when it snatched up just about every domain name variant with “Kumo” in it. Kumo is Microsoft’s weapon against super search engine Google. After dropping off the radar for a few months, recent reports indicate that the software giant may be gearing up to release its new search engine for public testing.

Microsoft’s current de facto search engine is Live Search. However, it appears the company is planning on replacing the outdated engine with something a bit more competitive to what Google has been offering.

According to CNET news, users have been randomly getting a search engine page that looks similar to what has been shown by Microsoft as Kumo. The configuration needed for this search engine to pop up is Windows 7 with IE 8 running together. However, even with the mentioned setup, the search page pops up at random to a small group of users.

From the screenshots sent in by users, Kumo looks to offer something similar to what is provided by Google currently. 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 said to make use of the newly acquired Powerset.

Microsoft seems to be taking the search engine battle to the next level by acquiring a company and developing a new search engine from scratch. Microsoft currently claims about 10.3 percent of the search engine market, with 15.8 percent from Yahoo and 64.2 percent from Google.

The company definitely 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.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 10:42 pm under Google, Internet, Microsoft, Yahoo!.

Read more entries by Mike Ferro.
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