Sources with knowledge of the situation said the company is expected to demonstrate it at our D: All Things Digital conference next week.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is scheduled to appear onstage at the event, a three-day event that hosts top players from the tech and media industries in interviews by AllThingsD.com Co-executive Editors Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

Code-named “Kumo,” the search engine is a major effort by Microsoft (MSFT) to raise its hand to table stakes in the battle for search market share with Google (GOOG)–something it desperately needs to do.

According to the latest metrics from comScore (SCOR), Google’s share of the search market rose to 64.2 percent in April from 63.7 percent in March and from 61.6 percent from a year ago. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s market share for the month topped out at 8.2 percent, down from 8.3 percent in March and 9.1 percent a year ago.

BoomTown liveblogged Yahoo’s “chalk talk” about search earlier today, which was an update of what the Internet giant is up to in the competitive space that includes Google and Microsoft.

Presenting at the event were Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy; Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products; and Marc Davis, chief scientist of Yahoo Mobile.

At its HQ in Silicon Valley last week, Google put on a similar show-off, called “Searchology,” about its own latest search innovations.

And although they are clearly No. 1 and No. 2 in the search space, both Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) are bracing for the launch a major overhaul of the Microsoft’s (MSFT) search offering, which is expected next week at the D: All Things Digital conference and code-named “Kumo.”

11:45 a.m. PDT: A delightful lunch was offered to a room full of tech reporters at the San Francisco offices of Yahoo’s outside PR firm, Outcast Communications.

But all the munching was quickly swept aside by the aggressive tone of the speech to be delivered by the normally gentle-looking Yahoos.

Apparently, top Yahoo execs want to “kill the 10 blue links.”

Yipes!

“Nobody really wants to search,” said Raghavan, describing a broken consumer experience and how Yahoo wanted to fix it. This has been a bell he has been ringing from last fall, in fact.

But we all were soon deep in the weeds of tech, as he noted that Yahoo wanted to move from a “Web of pages to a Web of objects.”

It still sounded very, very Webby.

12:01 p.m.: Soon, Raghavan started to talk about Yahoo products, such as Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), which he says has generated almost as many daily queries as Microsoft’s whole search offering.

Snap!

Next up was Cornett, who began talking about intent and how Yahoo was trying to weave what a consumer wants in with what is displayed.

That means “helping users accomplish that goal by connecting objects in the real world.”

He trotted out Yahoo’s Search Pad offering, which is simply a way for people to keep track of their searches online, instead of on a dopey scrap of paper that the dog eats.

Cornett also showed how embedded music, video and other structured data are inserted into mostly dull search results.

Yahoo, in other words, is going to know what we want and give it to us–even before we know we want it. Sounds like my mother!

12:15 p.m.: Cornett reeled off lots of stats about its SearchMonkey technology, which is a year old.

There was a picture of a monkey with a birthday hat, natch! (See here!)

SearchMonkey, according to Yahoo, is a “framework for creating small applications that enhance Yahoo search results with additional data and structure.”

Cornett then invited up Facebook software engineer Alex Moskalyuk to talk about building apps with SearchMonkey.

Lots of tech talk that was actually incomprehensible to the reporters gathered, although they all scribbled away (I, at this juncture, chose to eat another sandwich).

Here is one line: “Originally used XPath extractor, switched entirely to hCard.”

Welcome to my world! It’s like some telephone guy talking apart a handset and explaining the guts of the device, when I am only interested in making a call.

12:23 p.m.: Next up: Matthew Hertz of Pipl.com, a people search engine built on Yahoo’s BOSS.

People search was, he said, a “deep Web challenge.” Indeed, there needs to be an easier way of finding out about a potential date online!

Actually, Pipl is a nice service and useful too, and Hertz is right that Pipl should not have to reinvent the search wheel to take advantage of all the data already available on big search services.

12:29 p.m.: Yahoo’s chief mobile geek Marc Davis was up, talking about “answers, not just links.”

Now they’re talking!

Actually, mobile is a key search arena with the increasing popularity of smart phones.

That means knowing everything from movie times to weather to flights to cheap gas prices nearby immediately.

Twittery humanity needs to know now!

Yahoo’s offering is called oneSearch. which is also a good product. It better be. “For many people in the world, their phone is the way to access” the Internet, said Davis.

12:40 p.m.: Now, the Yahoos summed up “What’s Next?”

Let’s review: Kill the blue links! Intent! Objects! Open! Mobile!

Raghavan then gave me a great joke by using the term: WOO, which is Web of objects. Apparently, they go around Yahoo talking about getting to the WOO.

It sounded naughty and I liked it.

Time for Q&A!

A question was posed about how quickly Yahoo rolls out these technologies, which are often limited in “bucket tests” of smaller groups of users.

As soon as they can, of course.

Next question was about how WOO impacts online ads. “It takes us away from a marketplace of keywords to a marketplace of intent,” said Raghavan.

That means advertisers can eventually make better ads. Oh, joy.

Then a question about when links are appropriate and when rich search should prevail.

Well, it depends on the user!

Next, a question about the currently trendy “real-time” search–a magical power that the blogosphere has, in its infinite hype-osity, bestowed on Twitter.

Raghavan called it a “buzzword” and I agreed.

Cornett added, correctly, that it should be about precision and accuracy in search, as well as serving “fresh” data. Fresh was a diplomatic word for whatever the mostly useless tweets are yammering on about at any given moment, which are most pointless.

The next question was about how soon a lot of this cool rich search data gets to the masses. Answer: Some of it is in testing and some is live systemwide.

I then asked about whether Yahoo would shove out the bells and whistles if, say, Microsoft’s new search service has a lot of the same features.

Cornett noted that Yahoo will only roll out after testing showed good results.

In other words, Yahoo will kill (or drink) no blue links before their time!

More questions about rich data, with one that makes the point that Yahoo was originally known for “curation,” which was its original business as the Web’s first truly useful directory.

It was.

1:01 p.m.: Still more questions.

Someone asked the Yahoos to comment on a recent post on TechCrunch that said the company was not developing for BlackBerry and focusing intently on the iPhone from Apple (AAPL). An exaggeration, said Davis, which was a diplomatic way of saying the story was wrong.

Blackberry users can now relax.

Later today, as BoomTown reported last week, Yahoo is putting on a search party.

Well, not a “party” party–although there will apparently be some lunch noshing at the “Search chalk talk,” during which top techies at the Internet giant will talk up the strategy for its more innovative products, such as Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) and Search Monkey.

Presenting at the event with be: Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy; Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products; and Lee Ott, senior director, Mobile Search.

Yahoo (YHOO) has a search share that hovers around 20 percent, compared to the more than 70 percent that Google (GOOG) has.

At its HQ in Silicon Valley last week, Google put on a similar show-off, called “Searchology,” about its latest search innovations.

And, although they are clearly No. 1 and No. 2, both Google and Yahoo are bracing for the launch a major overhaul of Microsoft’s (MSFT) search offering, which is expected soon and code-named “Kumo.”

It will be interesting to see what Yahoo’s techies focus on, especially as the company’s brass continue to talk with Microsoft about a possible search and online advertising partnership.

I’ll be liveblogging the Yahoo event, which begins at 11:30 a.m. PDT.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Suddenly, search!

Earlier this week, Google put on a show called “Searchology” about its latest search innovations at its HQ in Silicon Valley.

And next Tuesday, Yahoo will trot out its search extravaganza, called “Search chalk talk,” during which top search techies will talk up its more innovative products, such as Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) and Search Monkey.

Could all this search blabbing have anything to do with a certain upcoming launch of a new search offering by a very rich and even more determined giant tech company?

As in: Microsoft (MSFT) and whatever it ends up calling its redone search product, code-named Kumo.

Since the launch is likely to be loud and splashy, the No. 1 and No. 2 search players needed to make some of their own noise in advance about their stuff.

So Google (GOOG)–which has a massive lead in search of upward of 70 percent–trotted out Udi Manber, VP of Search Engineering, and Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, this past Tuesday for a media audience.

The distillation of the event was that doing search well is still really, really hard–a new kind of “rocket science,” in fact, as Manber declared.

(Google’s spaceship crashed a bit today, as it turned out, with an outage, which was blamed on a “traffic jam” in Asia.)

At the event, the search giant also unveiled some new bells and whistles, such as Search Options, including a “Wonder Wheel” and “Google Squared,” as well as “Rich Snippets.”

Not to be outdone, Yahoo (YHOO) will have its own confab for reporters and bloggers next Tuesday morning in San Francisco.

Presenting at the event with be: Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy; Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products; and Lee Ott, senior director, Mobile Search.

Yahoo has a search share that hovers around 20 percent, which makes the upcoming increased competition from Microsoft more problematic.

Which is why the company continues its talks with Microsoft about a search and online advertising partnership.

But until any deal is struck, of course, it will be competition as usual.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

What’s in a name?

Well, a lot, actually, and BoomTown supposes it would be just like those Pacific Northwest types at Microsoft to name the new version of its search service “Bing,” presumably after the cherry that is a big product in the company’s home state.

That moniker is one of many being bandied about in a group the software giant could be considering for the big relaunch of its search service, which the company has been prepping.

Microsoft’s search service is currently called–zzzzz–Live Search.

“All About Microsoft” crack blogger Mary-Jo Foley of ZDNet recently wrote about the Bing name, which is registered to the company, as well as “Hook” and the one that Microsoft is using now as its test name, Kumo.

Kumo means “cloud” and “spider” in Japanese, which seems a wee bit esoteric.

Today, paidContent.org dropped “Sift” into the mix, although it seems to be related to mobile phones, along with “Swivel.”

I, for one, am feeling both like flour and getting dizzy at the thought of those names.

Foley at ZDnet feels the same, noting today in a post:

“(Would Microsoft be crazy enough to trademark its general Web search engine and its search engine for mobile with two different names, say Bing and Sift? As Windows Live has shown, truth can be stranger than fiction….)”

Microsoft (MSFT), of course, is keeping the name for its search service under tight wraps, but it is obviously going to be spending a shipload of money on its branding in another attempt to catch market leaders Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).

Microsoft has been recently talking to Yahoo about a search partnership deal, although they are likely both to keep their brands and search products in any event.

Nonetheless, execs and minions in the know laugh at me loudly when I ask them to leak it to me.

(Note to anyone at Microsoft: Pretty please, someone leak it to me, even if it’s in the form of a memo from the leaky cauldron that is Yahoo.)

I doubt someone will, though. “It’s like Fort Knox secret,” said one Softie source, referring to the Kentucky fortress where the largest amount of the United States gold reserves are stored.

Hey, if Auric Goldfinger, OddJob and Pussy Galore could get into Fort Knox in that most excellent James Bond film, I can certainly find out the name of Microsoft’s search service!

Personally, I like Bing, and cherries from Washington state are indeed tasty (and coming soon too!)

According to the Heart of Washington Web site, its state’s cherries rate. Some fun factoids:

- Washington State produces more than 50 percent of all the sweet cherries in the United States.
- The Rainier cherry, which is yellow with a red blush, was made from a cross between two dark red cherries, the Van and Bing.
- Americans eat approximately 2.6 pounds of cherries per year.
- There are approximately 53 pitted cherries in one pound of cherries.
- The Bing cherry, which all cherries are measured against, was first developed in 1874 in Milwaukie, Ore.
- The Bing cherry was named after one of Seth Lewelling’s workers. The Bing cherry was developed by Seth Lewelling.
- Washington cherries are shipped around the world; the top three foreign markets are Canada, Taiwan and Japan.
- In 2001, there were 29,000 acres of sweet cherries in the state.
- The Washington cherry season begins in late May with some product seen at farmer’s markets. Commercial shipping begins around June 5, and will continue until mid-August. The peak of the season runs from June 20 to Aug. 1.

Plus, if Microsoft uses Bing, they could also rebrand their MSN online service, “Bada” and their email product, “Boom.”

Then, they can get Tony Soprano as their spokesman with the motto: “Bada Bing, Bada Boom, Notta Bada Algorithm!”

Or better still: “If you use Google, we’ll whack you!”

Now, that’s more like it.

“I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

– Lauren from Microsoft’s new “Laptop Hunters” commercial

With Microsoft’s February share of the search market weighing in at a paltry 8.2 percent and declining, the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to reverse the public’s indifference to its search offering. It tried a loyalty program called Cashback–“We are ‘The Search That Pays You Back!’” It tried a rewards program called SearchPerks, as well–“Start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web!” Neither seems to have done much good.

Now, as it prepares to rebrand its search engine under a new name–Kumo–Microsoft (MSFT) is redoubling its marketing efforts with more proven methods. The company has hired ad agency JWT to create an estimated $80 million to $100 million ad campaign covering TV, online, print and radio. “According to one person close the situation, the forthcoming campaign will be careful to not position ‘Kumo’ as a competitor to Yahoo or Google and instead cast it as a reimagined search engine that ups the game by yielding fewer but more-focused results,” reports Ad Age, adding that such a strategy “is probably a good–if not the only–way to go.”

That said, if Kumo purports to be a “reimagined” search engine, it does seem to be lacking a bit in imagination. Certainly from what we’ve seen of it, Kumo doesn’t seem all that different from Google (GOOG). In fact, with its spartan design and goofy name, it arguably shares more similarities with the search sovereign than before. But then, perhaps, that’s the point. Perhaps what Microsoft is doing here is not reimagining Live Search as an entirely new game-changing service, but reimagining it as Google in hopes that we’ll forget its sad history as a failed Microsoft search product and reimagine it as a successful one.

“I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

– Lauren from Microsoft’s new “Laptop Hunters” commercial

With Microsoft’s February share of the search market weighing in at a paltry 8.2 percent and declining, the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to reverse the public’s indifference to its search offering. It tried a loyalty program called Cashback–“We are ‘The Search That Pays You Back!’” It tried a rewards program called SearchPerks, as well–“Start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web!” Neither seems to have done much good.

Now, as it prepares to rebrand its search engine under a new name–Kumo–Microsoft (MSFT) is redoubling its marketing efforts with more proven methods. The company has hired ad agency JWT to create an estimated $80 million to $100 million ad campaign covering TV, online, print and radio. “According to one person close the situation, the forthcoming campaign will be careful to not position ‘Kumo’ as a competitor to Yahoo or Google and instead cast it as a reimagined search engine that ups the game by yielding fewer but more-focused results,” reports Ad Age, adding that such a strategy “is probably a good–if not the only–way to go.”

That said, if Kumo purports to be a “reimagined” search engine, it does seem to be lacking a bit in imagination. Certainly from what we’ve seen of it, Kumo doesn’t seem all that different from Google (GOOG). In fact, with its spartan design and goofy name, it arguably shares more similarities with the search sovereign than before. But then, perhaps, that’s the point. Perhaps what Microsoft is doing here is not reimagining Live Search as an entirely new game-changing service, but reimagining it as Google in hopes that we’ll forget its sad history as a failed Microsoft search product and reimagine it as a successful one.

The software giant has jokingly renamed it Omuk, which is Kumo spelled backwards.

No kidding, but BoomTown likes it better!

As I wrote about Kumo and Microsoft (MSFT) efforts to compete better with archrival Google (GOOG) in early March:

“Sources at Microsoft said the company has not yet decided whether it will keep the Kumo name, which sounds a little too much like that crazy dog from the Stephen King novel.”

Thus, I was heartened when I obtained this internal memo, sent suspiciously on April Fool’s Day.

The Bernie Madoff and “muk it” jokes are actually funny.

Here’s the screenshot (click on it to make it larger) and the memo:

From: Brian MacDonald
Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 5:16 AM
To: Search FTE’s
Subject: Yesterday’s brand leak

Based on all the mail I have been getting on the topic, I imagine most people have seen the blog posts from late yesterday leaking the new brand. Marketing has asked me to share some of the “why” behind the final brand decision, but everyone should know that we are still officially keeping a “no comment” stance on the leak. We shouldn’t be discussing the new brand name externally until after the official launch.

In picking the new brand, marketing tried to have a brand that resonated with power users. We want to increase our fanbase amongst the heaviest searchers and want to pick a brand that will support that. Google had the scientific/math term kind of savvy user appeal and we wanted something akin to that. One of the real clever product names of all time was the operating system Gnu, which stood for Gnu’s Not Unix, with the G not really standing for anything. Kind of quirky and kind of fun.

So this same kind of thinking was behind the brand name. So it was Kumo after all, but with a twist. Kumo was just our new brand spelled backwards. The new brand “Omuk” stands, gnu-like, for “Omuk means unlimited knowledge.” The phrase “unlimited knowledge” really resonated with focus groups as something they most wanted to achieve with a search engine. It is rare that you can get the brand promise so neatly tied directly to the brand name. It also ties in corporate wide with the Unlimited Potential group etc.

There is a lot of riffs marketing can do in advertising with “unlimited knowledge.” If you recall the Dreyer’s Ice Cream ads where they brought in people who said they were abducted by aliens etc. and then did the tagline “unbelievable product from an unbelievable spokesperson” etc., we can do something similar. For example, tying Bernie Madoff, Unlimited Chutzpah with Omuk, Unlimited Knowledge. That type of thing.

In testing, Omuk scored very high on attributes like “empowering”, “organized” and “warm/fuzzy.” Another key attribute was ease of spelling and Omuk did very well. There was some concerns that people might spell it ohmuk or omuck but that didn’t happen.

The final key feature for the brand was verbability. Here marketing is planning to go with a little ingenuity and drop the o and just push “muk it.” In ads they will get playful and have the actors talk about the joys of accessing unlimited knowledge by just “muking around”, etc. The hope is to generate a lot of word-of-mouth and free impressions on the internet the way that the very successful Bill and Jerry commercials did for Windows.

Below is a sample homepage screenshot with the new brand. Really looks great. This also has the latest thinking on default “scopes.”

–Brian

First the company gave us CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), an “artificial intelligence” tasked-array system with the personality of a 12-year-old girl and accompanied by its own homepage, YouTube channel, blog, monograph and versions of Google Earth and Google Maps. And to these, Google has added Google LOLCODE, Google Brain Search, Google Chrome with 3-D and a new Gmail auto-reply feature. The search giant also announced a new upside-down viewing option for YouTube and an automatic red-eye function for Picasa.

Overkill? Maybe, just a little. Google (GOOG), of course, wasn’t alone in pumping the Web full of pranks. Seems people with Web sites everywhere fancy themselves Don Rickles today. Hotels.com began taking reservations for rooms on the Moon. And Expedia (EXPE) began offering flights to Mars. Microsoft (MSFT) renamed its Kumo search product Omuk and unveiled Alpine Legend for Xbox 360. Some angry librarians staged a Kindle burning in a Los Angeles park. Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media appointed Gary Busey as Director of Human Resources. Torrent index The Pirate Bay partnered with the hopelessly litigious Warner Bros. The Guardian adopted an all-Twitter publishing model. Gizmodo was taken over by spam overlords. Amazon (AMZN) launched a brand new cloud-computing dirigible called Floating Amazon Cloud Environment, or FACE. Yahoo (YHOO) debuted an Ideological Search. And, finally, Qualcomm (QCOM) took convergence a bit too literally.

There are plenty of others, of course, far too many to mention here, and most of them unworthy of that mention in the first place. As Good Morning Silicon Valley aptly notes, “The sad fact is that pranks are like fireworks–once amateurs get to fiddling around with them, somebody’s going to end up lame.”

Here below are three screenshots of Microsoft’s internal test of a new search product called Kumo.

The long expected upgrade to the Live Search product from Microsoft (MSFT) is being tested for a public rollout later this year.

The blogosphere was a-twitter, literally, after a Twitter post by Powerset co-founder Barney Pell this past weekend, about a rebranding and updating of the search offering. (Microsoft acquired Powerset last year and Pell works on search strategy.)

Sources at Microsoft said the company has not yet decided whether it will keep the Kumo name, which sounds a little too much like that crazy dog from the Stephen King novel.

Maybe that’s the point, at least related to Google. (Chomp!)

In Japanese, actually, Kumo has two definitions–cloud and spider.

Microsoft has been trying to catch up in the search game by spending big-time after it failed to acquire Yahoo (YHOO) last year.

And it still wants to do a search deal with Yahoo, in order to make a dent in the market dominance of Google (GOOG).

Until then, of course, Microsoft must innovate. And, so far, Kumo seems to be an interesting effort with a clean and spare look.

But what do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Also, here is the memo from Microsoft search head Satya Nadella about it, urging all company employees to try it out and send feedback:

From: Satya Nadella
Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 4:18 PM
To: Microsoft–All Employees (QBDG)
Subject: Announcement: Internal Search Test Experience

The Search team needs you. We’ve been working hard to improve our search service and want to share the progress we are making with you. We are launching a new test program called kumo.com for employees to try and provide feedback. Kumo.com exists only inside the corporate network, and in order to get enough feedback we will be redirecting internal live.com traffic over to the test site in the coming days. Kumo is the codename we have chosen for the internal test.

In spite of the progress made by search engines, 40% of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46% of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes. These and many other learnings suggest that customers often don’t find what they need from search today.

We believe we can provide a better and more useful search experience that helps you not just search but accomplish tasks. During the test, features will vary by country, but you’ll see results organized in a way that saves you more time. An explorer pane on the left side of results pages will give you access to tools that help you with your tasks. Other features like single session history and hover preview help accomplish more in search sessions.

Your Next Search…

To get started, visit kumo.com or click one of the samples below to see how it’s possible to find the right results more easily:

· Audi S8
· Taylor Swift
. Bose Lifestyle 48

You can also set your search defaults to test site using the instructions here.

Your Feedback is Critical

As employees, you are some of our most informed users and our toughest critics, and we highly value your input and feedback to help us build a better service. You have been an important voice in our efforts, and the feedback you’ve sent us since the company meeting has been amazing.

When you visit kumo.com, at the bottom right corner of the each page you’ll see a feedback badge. We ask that each time you use the test site, click the feedback badge and take a moment to answer four quick and simple questions. Feel free to reach out to give us extra feedback directly on our blog and by mailing sfeed. For answers to common questions make sure to see our FAQ.

We are committed to rapid innovation and improvement. Please give the test site a try, rate the results and let us know what you think.

Satya

Here are the three screenshots too (click on the images twice to make them larger):

Taylor Swift

Audi S8

Bose Lifestyle 48