New MSNBot (msnbot/2.0b) from Live Search

Microsoft is getting ready to introduce its latest move against Google, an overhauled boot for its search engine. While the Redmond company is laboring to reportedly scrap the Live Search brand in favor of Kumo, with a transition of leadership as Qi Lu takes on the new role of president of the Online Services Group, the organic evolution of Live Search moves forward. In this regard, the latest product on the Live Search front is a new MSNBot.

“Live Search is committed to continuing to improve how we discover and crawl your content. In the coming weeks, we will be testing an update to MSNBot, which may show up as a new crawler name in your referrer logs. The new crawler user agent string will appear as: msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm). You’ll still see the current version msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) as Live Search’s primary user agent,” Jeremiah Andrick, program manager, Live Search Webmaster Center, revealed.

Webmasters and web content owners will be the ones directly affected by Microsoft testing the new MSNBot. The new Live Search crawler will generate extra traffic as far as bots are concerned, but the software giant is promising that MSNBot/2.0b will tiptoe on websites and that it will not take a heavy tole on the resources available.

Qi Lu, the new president of the Online Services Group, indicated that one of the pitches that convinced him to join Microsoft was CEO Steve Ballmer's promise that the Redmond company had a strong focus on driving product quality.

“We intend to ensure that any robots exclusion protocol you are using is respected. As such, you don’t need to update your Robots.txt file. We plan on crawling at a slow speed during the tests with the updated version. When the new crawler replaces our current crawler, we will keep you up-to-date,” Andrick added.

Microsoft Is Cooking a Kumo Live Search Rebrand - Kumo.com now on Live Search servers

It remains to be seen whether rechristening Live Search will deliver a positive impact in terms of gathering and keeping fresh eyeballs, if it will just be a strategy with little repercussions in terms of market share, or if it will have just the opposite effect, and drive users away from Microsoft's search engine. However, the fact of the matter is that the software giant is indeed cooking a Live Search rebranding, with Kumo (Kumo.com) as one of the candidate brands.

The fact that Microsoft was considering a brand evolution for Live Search was initially reported by Mary Jo Foley. In this regard, LiveSide has indicated that Kumo is now under Microsoft's control, but accessible only to employees.

Meaning both “cloud” and “spider” in Japanese, Kumo is, without a doubt, intimately connected with Live Search, considering the domain servers the company is using, namely NS.USWEST.SEARCH.LIVE.COM; NS.USEAST.SEARCH.LIVE.COM and NS.ANYCAST.SEARCH.LIVE.COM. However, until this point in time, Microsoft has steered right clear of confirming any future plans related to a Live Search rebranding. As far as Kumo is concerned, mum's the word from Microsoft.

Still, one thing is clear, the Redmond company has nothing short of big plans for Kumo.com. The domain has been registered for no less than 10 years, and is scheduled for expiration on July 19, 2018. The registration of Live.com, the home of Live Search, is set to expire in 2017.

In the race with Google, Microsoft is not fighting just a search engine, but the technology behind it. Google is a brand that is now virtually synonymous with search, and the Redmond company has nothing to counter this aspect. Windows Live Search, Live Search, and Live.com simply do not have sufficient brand potential to go against Google, in the context in which users are no longer searching the web, they are googling it. The question is will anybody be kumoing it?