Microsoft's Live Search Gets New Life?

Microsoft registered the Kumo.com domain name last week, a move that sparked speculation Microsoft is considering rebranding/relaunching Live Search. Kumo in Japanese means "spider" and "cloud"—both appropriate terms for a search technology. (It's also a popular name for Japanese restaurants, as a Google search shows.)

Another sign of Microsoft's efforts to boost Live Search: Microsoft has hired Sean Suchter, currently Yahoo's vice president of search technology, to join Microsoft in late December as general manager of the company's Silicon Valley Search Technology Center. That's widely viewed as a big loss for Yahoo and a big gain for Microsoft.

Microsoft has struggled to find a winning strategy to compete with Google, far and away the leader in the Internet space. Google has a 63 percent share of the U.S. search market compared with Yahoo's 19.6 percent and Microsoft's 8.3 percent, according to Citi Investment Research and ComScore qSearch.

Earlier this year Yahoo spurned Microsoft's efforts to buy the entire company and, later, Yahoo's search business. As Yahoo's financial situation has deteriorated—Jerry Yang announced last week that he's stepping down as CEO—Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has insisted that the company is no longer interested in buying Yahoo. But he has signaled that a deal involving Yahoo's search business might still be possible.