There are reports that Microsoft’s new search engine known as Kumo is about to be released (ultimately it may be called “Bing”) which will replace “Live Search.” Apparently Microsoft leaked copies of Kumo recently and from all reviews there’s nothing too radical, but what is radical is the Wolfram|Alpha search engine which was seen on TV news last week. The Wolfram|Alpha search engine provides users very different information, however since it is so radically different it remains to be seen how successful its approach will be.
Update on Search Engine Rankings
comScore just released its new search engine rankings without much surprise- Google increased slightly from 63.7% to 64.2% of all Internet searches between March and April 2009 while Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask, and AOL were relatively flat. Since Microsoft (20.4%) and Yahoo! (8.2%) searches combine for 28.6% of all Internet searches, there has been renewed speculation that Microsoft and Yahoo! will form an alliance to try to get a larger market share and be more competitive with Google.
Microsoft vs. Google- Search Engines and Browsers
From earlier blogs you will recall that Google is complaining about Microsoft’s deployment of Internet Explorer in the EU as anticompetitive. Interestingly part of Microsoft’s defense is apparently that by expanding competition in the browser market in the EU will only encourage more Google Internet searches which will be anticompetitive to Microsoft. So it will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s deployment of Kumo may allow Google to argue to the EU that Microsoft’s defense should fail since Microsoft is aggressively competing with Google in the search engine market.
What do you think? I welcome comments.