Microsoft Expected to Show Off 'Kumo' at D7 Next Week: WSJ

Microsoft is expected to show a version of its new search engine next week at the D7 conference in California, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The May 26-28 “D: All Things Digital” conference is put on by the Journal. Two months ago the All Things Digital blog reported that […]

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Microsoft is expected to show a version of its new search engine next week at the D7 conference in California, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter.

The May 26-28 "D: All Things Digital" conference is put on by the Journal. Two months ago the All Things Digital blog reported that Kumo, which would be Microsoft's latest answer to search leader Google and number-two player Yahoo, was undergoing internal testing.

While the search wars seem settled for now — Google owns 64% of the market — there has been a flurry of activity this week in what is, outside of the still-evolving still-evolving mobiles search space, a fairly moribund space of incremental rather than paradigmatic changes.

Wolfram Alpha went live on Monday, not so much a search tool as a computational dashboard that aims to be informed by all available facts to answer complex, "sematic" questions. And Yahoo only yesterday saw fit to brief reporters on refinements to its approach to displaying search results.

Microsoft unsuccessfully sought to buy Yahoo last year in a bid to join forces on search, and is still holding out the possibility of some kind of combination in the search space. Google walked away from a search deal with Yahoo when it became clear that regulators would try to prevent it. But clearly Microsoft is still interested in raising the stakes to rise out of the single-digit search cellar.

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Microsoft Expected to Show New Search Engine Next Week [WSJ.com