November 23rd, 2008
Would you 'Kumo' it?
A few months back, I noted Microsoft had been exploring some new possibilities for rebranding its search engine — among them, Kumo.
The LiveSide.Net folks are reporting tonight that Microsoft has taken control of the Kumo.com domain and has started redirecting (internally) some of its servers to it.
This doesn’t meant that Microsoft definitely will rebrand its Live Search as Kumo. But it does lead one to the conclusion that now that Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo is looking less and less likely (especially given Microsoft’s ability to attract some of Yahoo’s leading search talent), Microsoft needs to forge ahead and do what it had considered doing months ago — namely, rebrand its horribly named Live Search.
What do you think of “Kumo” — which means “cloud” or “spider” in Japanese (depending on the Kanji used) — as a new name for Live Search? If you hate it, any other verb-like names you’d suggest to the Softies in their ongoing quest to raise the search share above 10 percent?
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