By NICK WINGFIELD
Wall Street Journal
Microsoft Corp. has begun testing a revamped version of its Internet search service, dubbed Kumo.com, as the software giant tries to improve its third-place position in the online search market.
In an email sent Monday afternoon to all Microsoft employees, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of research and development for Microsoft's online services division, invited company staffers to begin testing the Kumo search engine, currently only available on the company's internal network. For now, Microsoft's Live Search, at live.com, remains the company's search engine for the public.
A person familiar with the matter said Microsoft hasn't decided yet whether to rebrand Live Search as Kumo, which Mr. Nadella refers to as a code name in his email. Kumo in Japanese means spider, a reference to so-called spider software that crawls from Web site to Web site, adding the data to vast search-engine indexes.
Speculation has long swirled on the Internet that Microsoft would use the Kumo name for its search engine after it was discovered that the company had ownership of the Kumo.com address. But the company will need more than a name change to improve its position in the search business. In January, Microsoft accounted for 9.8% of Internet searches, behind Yahoo Inc.'s 22.2% and Google Inc.'s 58.5%, according to comScore Inc.
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