Microsoft to launch last ditch search effort

Stan Beer
Monday, 25 May 2009 19:32

Opinion and Analysis

The blogosphere is teeming with reports and rumours about the imminent release of a new Microsoft search engine possibly as early as next week. We caught a glimpse of it a couple of months ago when Microsoft leaked some screen shots of its Kumo project.

From what we were led to believe, Kumo was all about organising search results in a better way than Google does and clustering results under headings or categories (in much the same way that a search engine called Clusty does).

There were also rumours that Kumo had semantic search capabilities that could for example enable users to search on related images and so on.

Now there are rumours that the new search engine has been given the unlikely name of Bing (then again who would have thought of naming a search engine Google).

Whatever turns out to be true, one thing is clear. Microsoft has a monumental task ahead of it if it hopes to put even a small dent in Google's armour in the search space.

Google has somewhere between 60-65% share of the global search space, while Yahoo has a shrinking 20% and Microsoft has a shrinking even faster less than 10%.

While Google's dominance in search is still not as great as Microsoft's in the desktop operating system space, its star is on the rise while Microsoft's is at best moving side ways.

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