Steve Ballmer just announced Microsoft’s newest search offering on the D7 stage. He introduced it by showing a video, a Star Trek parody called “A bold search for a new name.” The video runs over Microsoft’s chronic re-naming of its search engine. And...

In an entertaining , slightly off color , and by some accounts inspiring performance at D: the All Things Digital conference, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz left the door open for a search deal.  That deal would have to be made with someone with the right...

Microsoft acquired Bing.com in March, and has a network all set up:   but as we reported last week, there’s that pesky little US Patent and Trademark Office to get around .  The problem is with Bing Mobile, which is just too confusing for the...

This is a big week or so for Microsoft, and for Live Search.  According to reports from the Wall St. Journal, the widely anticipated new version of Live Search, code named Kumo, is set to be unveiled at D : The All Things Digital conference in Carslbad...

In a document filed this morning and mailed to Microsoft, the US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Microsoft’s filing of “Bing” as a trademark name for “computer search engine software; graphical user interface software...

The Live Search Webmaster Center blog just posted a follow up regarding numerous complaints about the behavior of MSNbot, which last month was wreaking havoc on some of the websites it was crawling, according to reports. Last week, a patch to the crawler...

The Wall St. Journal is reporting today that Microsoft is expected to show for the first time publically its new search effort, code named Kumo, at “ D: All Things Digital ”.  The technology conference, hosted by All Things D bloggers Walt Mossberg...

Kumo, the for now name of a newly rebranded Microsoft Live Search, should be upon us soon. Kumo has been in corporate wide internal testing at Microsoft since early March (oops added the time frame), and at least parts of what appears to be a new UI have...

Some 90,000 Microsoft employees are currently testing a new version of Live Search under the name Kumo (well, some of them are testing it, the other half are using Google, apparently).  Expected to be released (or at least announced) in early June, Kumo, or whatever it ends up being called, seems to be taking on a life of its own as Microsoft stays mum and Twitter and the blogs have a field day. 

(Note that the Kumo name may not be final, from what we hear, and that the final product may still indeed be called Bing or Sift or something else entirely. We’ll call it Kumo for now, and wait to see if the name sticks).

Is Kumo just a rebranding effort, a bold foray into the semantic web, or just a rebate program for eBay?  Lots of speculation but not much in the way of facts out there, so just what is Kumo, anyway?  Let’s take a look at what to expect:

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Sometimes on Twitter Search  you see a bunch of re-tweets, a “twitmeme”, if you will.  Right now a big one is “Microsoft embraces Open Source Big Time for Kumo” (eh, what?, more on that later).  Another one that caught our eye was this...

Now you can also find your favorite videos and the baseball scores for your favorite baseball team on your mobile. The Live Search Mobile team just launched these two features : - MSN Video search Looking to fill some time while you’re on the go and feel...

We reported last week on a countdown clock that a Neowin member spotted while at Microsoft, and yesterday Live Search Tech Evangelist Nathan Buggia tweeted that the internal Kumo trial will soon come to an end: In preparation for what we think will be...

Search Engine Roundtable has been following a thread at WebMaster World concerning some disturbing behavior from MSNbot , the crawler Live Search uses to find and index information on the web.  As of last night (April 28), the offending “feature...

Danny Sullivan, Editor in Chief of Search Engine Land , conference organizer for Search Marketing Expos and Search Marketing Now, and all around search guru, took some time with us today to talk about Live Search, in conjunction with the upcoming SMX...

A post on a Neowin forum crossed our path this weekend (thanks for the tip, CalumJR!): apparently the poster was hanging out at Bldg 88 (which does house parts of Live Search), and spotted a “Countdown to Kumo” clock on a TV there. I'm just...