Microsoft's New Platform Search: Kumo

Kumo, Microsoft’s latest attempt at breaking into the Web searching top tier, was reported in a story in The Wall Street Journal that focused on Microsoft’s efforts to re-tool their search platform.

From the pictures of the Kumo results page, it looks a lot like Clusty or Ask.

I wish Microsoft well in their efforts, but I don’t know if this is going to shake things up enough.

The email from Satya Nadelle that appeared in the Wall Street Journal story stuck me as odd, especially this quote:

In spite of the progress made by search engines, 40% of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46% of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes. These and many other learnings suggest that customers often don’t find what they need from search today.

These are all behavior statistics that, by themselves, could be either strengths or weaknesses. 40% of queries go unanswered (I believe he is talking about 40% of all queries don’t get a click) may mean that the search engine results page had the answer and there was no need to click a link.

50% of queries are on repeat tasks could mean that folks do similar tasks over time.

46% of search sessions durations are longer than 20 minutes – good or bad depending on the topic. (Note: This is way higher than published work in the area of session duration. See this report on page visitations and this on session durations.)

This is behavioral data that needs combined with attitudinal data to get real meaning.

Microsoft has an uphill climb, regardless. Google has a great search platform, the easiest to use keyword advertising service around, and wonderful market share. Yahoo! is hanging on to sizeable market share, has a good keyword advertising platform, and an excellent brand name. Ask has some great technology and a willingness to quickly try new things. Tough competition, even with the Microsoft bank account.

What will do it for Microsoft? One of two things.

(1) Some disruptive technology that users just cannot ignore. Hard to do in the competitive search engine market.

(2) Some change in customer behavior not related to technology (i.e., get customers to change for some reason other than better search results). Again, hard to unless one of the competitors screw up.