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May 20, 2009
Microsoft to Launch New Search Engine: Report
Don’t look now Google ( News - Alert). Microsoft Corp. is set to break into the search engine business with a brand new entry.
Hoping to better compete against the likes of Google, Microsoft ( News - Alert) reportedly plans to launch a new search engine next week. The software company has been testing a new version of the service internally under the code name of Kumo.com, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Kumo in Japanese means "cloud" or "spider," according to a report in The Seattle Times.
The new search engine, which Microsoft has tested privately for months, is designed to better organize search results and minimize the amount of time they spend clicking Web pages searching for information, the Wall Street Journal said. Microsoft is planning to launch a major advertising campaign to promote the new search engine, and has hired the agency JWT to develop a campaign, it said.
The newspaper also said that Microsoft and Yahoo! were continuing talks on a potential search partnership. The companies have been discussing a deal under which Yahoo! would sell its Web search and search advertising technology to Microsoft for payment and some share of the revenue of the search ads it shows on Yahoo!, the report said.
The latest comScore numbers, released this week show Google increasing its share to 64.2 percent of searches in the U.S. in April, versus and 20.4 percent for Yahoo and 8.2 percent for Microsoft.
Web surfers may welcome the addition of a new search engine as Google has recently experienced server issues. As TMC ( News - Alert) reported, Google users had no access to Google News or e-mail for about an hour last week. The company explained it had to direct some of its Web traffic through Asia, which caused the traffic jam. As a result, 14 percent of Google users experienced “slow services or even interruptions.”
Then, a day later, Google users experienced a second round of outages, leaving many people searching for alternate search engines. The outages came on the heels of Google announcing some new features designed to help Web surfers with complex searches.
Last year, new search engine, “Cuil” (pronounced “cool”) emerged. As TMC reported, Culi was the brainchild of former Google engineers. It was the latest challenger to try to capture users from Google.
Edited by Amy Tierney
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