icrosoft is on its way to test its next generation search technology “Kumo”.

Kumo is a Japanese word meaning ‘Cloud‘ or ‘Spider‘. For past few months Microsoft has been running internal testing for its new search technology code named Kumo.  Kumo may come up with some design changes which are now limited to public.

Kumo will come up with new look and feel which is different from Live. Kumo will have a left hand navigation pane – a key feature of Kumo.
“We are continuously looking for ways to improve Live Search for both advertisers and consumers,” the software maker said in a statement. “As part of that effort, we regularly conduct public tests of certain feature sets. This is an example of one such test with a very limited audience.” said by one of the officials at Microsoft.

The new Kumo will come up with image results in searches like Google. According to Nielsen Online in March, Microsoft had 10.3 percent of the U.S. search market, as compared to 15.8 percent for Yahoo and 64.2 percent for Google.

When I compared Google image results with Live image search. The image search of Live has been better then Google. Microsoft need a search technology to hit the market, hope it will be Kumo.

Here is the first snapshot of Kumo for you…