Although screenshots and information has already hit the internet regarding Kumo, Microsoft’s latest attempt to create a search engine that can challenge Google, it is heavily rumoured that this weeks ‘D: All Things Digital’ conference shall host its official unveiling. Over the last decade Google has gone from strength to strength and is currently reported to posses nearly 65% of the internet search market. Following on from Google, Yahoo is the second most popular search engine (with a little under 20% of the market) leaving Microsoft’s current live.com search engine sitting in third place (with around 8% of the market). By rethinking their current search strategy Microsoft are hoping that Kumo could help them steal some of the search market from Google and Yahoo, but will this pay of or shall this effort prove to be too little to late to have any dramatic effect on the current search landscape?
How is Kumo different from Live?
In order whether to judge if Kumo is likely to have any chance of challenging the two more popular search engines the first thing to look at is what it offers that Live.com previously did not. The most obvious addition is the extra column that has been added to the left hand side of the page. While Live was split into two columns (results on the left, ads on the right; much like Google) Kumo has added a new column on the left hand side of the page. This column provides semantically suggested areas to search within, related searches and a search history. Top of the column are the types of results that the user can choose between. Rather than providing the standard topics (images, videos, news, shopping etc) it provides topics relevant to the search conducted. For example searching for a musician may yield topics such as albums, lyrics, biography and singles while searching for a car might provide prices, fuel consumption and repairs. These semantic categories could allow the users to quickly narrow the results down to a specific topic and prove a useful tool. Below this is the related search topics, these suggestions are almost identical to those recommendations provided by other search engines, and those found on the top right corner of the Live results page. The final element added to this new column is the provision of a search history. Microsoft’s research has found that around half of all searches are repeats of previous searches, in order to help streamline users searching they have provided a history of the most recent few searches that users are able to click back to without re-entering the search query.
It remains to be seen how Kumo will affect SEO, although at the moment it does not seem likely to have a huge impact. I recently employed the
SEO services of a company that provide both SEO and
Web design Edinburgh which resulted in a huge boost in traffic for my site.
At the moment, provided the results provided are high quality, Kumo could provide a clean, user-friendly search engine; but is that enough to challenge Google? I feel that while Kumo has a couple of nice additions (particularly the semantic categories) there is really nothing groundbreaking here, and nothing that cannot be easily added to the competing engines. Google already sits in an enormously dominant position (the fact that the term ‘google’ is used as a verb shows just how dominant) and without a massive shift in how searches are conducted they are very unlikely to be moved.
