Microsoft plans later this week to begin internal testing of Kumo, a long-anticipated update to its Live Search product, CNET News has learned.
Ultimately, Kumo is designed to be both a rebranding and an update for Live Search, although at this point Microsoft is describing it as "an internal test environment."
"Kumo is the name of an internal test environment we are launching to a small sampling of employees...this week," a Microsoft representative told CNET. Kumo had been long rumored to be a possible name for the Live Search rebranding.
Barney Pell
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET)Word that Microsoft was close to launching the new search tool began with a Twitter posting by Powerset co-founder Barney Pell, who now serves as a "search strategist and evangelist" for Microsoft. In the posting, reported by enthusiast site LiveSide, Pell did not mention the Kumo name, but said that the site was getting an updated user interface and new brand.
"Barney was referring to our internal testing environments," the Microsoft representative said, adding that the company had nothing to announce today. "We are not in a position to confirm what will come to the market or when." Microsoft acquired Pell's Powerset in July.
Kumo is separate from another search tool being offered to employees by Microsoft Research. That tool, shown last week at TechFest and known as Viveri, uses the Live Search engine in combination with new visualization and vertical search technologies.
"They are different but they are complementary," the Microsoft representative said.
Meanwhile, Search Engine Land also noted a couple of changes on the public Live Search site, including "best match" and "categorized listings" options.
"We regularly test or 'flight' new features for a small subset of searchers," Microsoft said. "The purpose of these flights is to gauge customer response and collect data, which may or may not lead to eventual integration into the larger service."
On Tuesday, Microsoft released version 4.0 of Windows Live Search Mobile, its downloadable search and map app for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, which the company demoed last week at CES.
With this release, Microsoft is finally starting to catch up to other free clients doing mobile voice and text search on other platforms--Google Mobile App, Yahoo Go, and Vlingo among them.
From left to right: bird's eye view, query auto-suggest, and directions.
(Credit: Microsoft)Taking a page from Google's book, perhaps, the new Locate Me feature in Windows Live Search Mobile can work on non-GPS phones to zero in on your approximate location. If that fails, you can easily add your location manually instead.
Predictive text is also new--when you type a query into the search box, the app will suggest a search term in order to save your fingers some typing. The app did better remembering past queries than it did predicting new ones, and it did not begin suggesting new search terms until we were almost done typing them.
In addition, the search box will now accept mixed queries; for instance, if you speak or type a business name and city into the search box, you'll see results for the business in that second location, without changing your master location. Hunting down a Dunkin' Donuts in Boston when you're living in San Francisco is one example.
Bird's Eye View is the splashiest of the added features, adding a third mode to map-viewing that's akin to Google's Street View. The landmarks we saw were clear, but the view is limited to "select urban areas" and grays out if the one you want isn't part of it. We hope the selection will expand soon.
These additions enhance Windows Live Search's otherwise well-integrated features--click-to-call, SMS, driving directions, and search modules that focus on traffic, movies, gas stations, and weather in your area.
Microsoft announced Tuesday that it updated its Live Search Webmaster Center with the ability to detect malware on a publisher's site as well as any outbound links contained on that site. It also announced the launch of a simplified authentication process that makes accessing the company's Webmaster tools much easier.
According to Microsoft's senior director of Live Search, Angus Norton, the company's new malware detection tool will crawl sites for malware. Where there is malware present, it will automatically disable all the links that contain it and alert Webmasters to the issue. A report, which can be downloaded from Microsoft's Webmaster tools page, details which pages are affected and how the site can resolve the issue. Until the malware is removed, Microsoft will flag all the harmful links contained in search results as malware.
Microsoft's new Webmaster tools are active now on the company's page.
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Microsoft)
A view of Yahoo Glue Pages when they debuted in India earlier this year. The feature builds a mini-portal around search results.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo rolled out a U.S. beta version of its Glue Pages, giving a visual boost to users' search results, according to a posting on its Yahoo blog site.
The beta is designed to allow users to enter a search and have not only text links appear on the site, but also related pictures, videos and blogs.
The company is taking a page from its Yahoo India Glue Pages site, which it unveiled in May.
With this effort, Yahoo is seeking to put related content all on one page, while its competitor Google currently offers up text links, with additional links to related photos, videos, blogs, books and news.
Microsoft's Live Search takes a similar approach to Google's.
Privacy advocates are starting to sound the alarm over a feature in Google's Chrome that sends anything typed in the browser's Omnibox back to Google.
Google told CNET News earlier Wednesday that it plans to store about 2 percent of the data it gets back, along with the IP address of the computer that sent it. Google said it won't receive or store data if users turn off the auto-suggest feature or if they select a default search provider other than Google or if they are using the product's "Incognito" mode.
Still, EFF staff technologist Peter Eckersley said in an interview that he is concerned about Google having yet another window into what the world is browsing.
"We're worried that Chrome will be another giant conveyer belt moving private information about our use of the Web into Google's data vaults," Eckersley said. "Google already knows far too much about what everybody is thinking at any given moment."
Eckersley did point out that there are several ways to keep the data from being sent to Google, but noted that there is still a lot of data that will head Google's way.
Because Chrome is open source, Eckersley suggested that one option would be for privacy-minded outsiders to create their own suggestion engine that sits on surfers' own PCs, offering some of the utility that Google provides, without having to send the data to its servers. He noted that Chrome, itself, already does this when a surfer uses Chrome in its more stealthy Incognito mode. In that case, all suggestions are based on a surfer's locally stored history.
"The addition of Incognito is great," he said, adding that Google is making some strides with Chrome, clearly recognizing that people want to be able to surf the Web without having a record of it stored in various places.
"They are making some initial moves in the directions of that," Eckersley said, but reiterated his concerns over how the Omnibox works.
"We are genuinely really worried about the Omnibox thing," he said. "It's just one more piece of the complete puzzle of Google seeing everything that everyone is doing."
Simon Davies, Founder of Privacy International and a senior fellow with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) also expressed concern over the Omnibox feature.
"I'm astonished that these terms are sent to Google even without the return being hit," Davies said. "That is beyond anything that Google has ever contemplated before."
Davies said the lack of attention to privacy and less-than-clear disclosure of its information use is typical Google behavior.
"This is why Google is running into trouble with regulators in Europe," Davies said. "They will trip themselves up at some point very badly. The patience of regulators is growing thin."
Updated 2 p.m., with change in license terms.
Google said on Wednesday that it plans to alter contract terms that gave the search provider broad rights to use anything entered into its new Chrome browser.
"In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products," Google said in a statement provided to CNET News. "Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don't apply well to the use of that product. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service."
As first noted by CNET News on Tuesday, Chrome's End User License agreement appeared to give Google a perpetual right to use anything one entered into the browser. Section 11 stated that although users retain copyright to their works, "by submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."
Google said the change, once it is made, will apply retroactively to anyone who has downloaded the browser.
All this is separate from the issue of what information Google plans to store on its servers. Provided that users leave on the auto-suggest feature in Chrome and have Google as their default search provider, Google has the right to store any information typed into Chrome's Ominibox, which serves as both search bar and address bar. The software maker told CNET News it plans to store about 2 percent of all such data, along with the IP address of the computer that entered the information.
Update: As of 2 p.m. PT, it looks like the terms have changed. Section 11 now reads simply: "11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."
As I made the usual morning slog through my in-box Monday, I was about to skip past a news release touting a back-to-school promotion for Live Search Cashback, when I noticed one of the featured deals was on a ThinkPad tablet PC from electronic shoe retailer Zappos.com.
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Converse)
Thinking for sure it was a typo, I went to harass the person who sent me the release. The funny thing is, it really is Zappos selling that tablet computer. I missed it when Zappos expanded from high heels to high tech.
While the departure sounds strange, Zappos certainly wouldn't be the first online retailer to go well beyond its initial category. As we all know, Amazon was the world's largest bookstore before it moved into groceries, sporting goods, and basically anything they can put in a box (and even a few things that don't need a box).
The key was Amazon had a logistics system that worked better than anyone else's. I have no idea how efficient Zappos system is, since I still buy my shoes the old-fashioned way. However, my co-workers tell me they are amazingly fast at getting your order to you and, well, they do have cool robots.
As for that Live Search Cashback promotion, some of the participants, like Zappos, are offering double their usual cash-back percentage during August to those who place their order after going through Microsoft's site.
Microsoft is planning a new release this spring of its Live search product, code-named Rome.
That tidbit was mentioned Friday as part of the software giant's employee Webcast to discuss the Yahoo bid. Microsoft filed a transcript of the employee meeting on Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is just the first of many product tidbits one can expect as part of the regulatory filings being made in conjunction with the offer.
Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't share much on what can be expected with Rome. Microsoft updated its search product last September, although the company has continued to remain a distant third to Google and Yahoo in the search market.
Microsoft said it is also planning its next update for Windows Live. The company began the second generation of the Internet services suite last July.
"We are now in vision phase for Windows Live wave 3, working to get that out later this year," division President Kevin Johnson told employees during the Webcast.
We'll be doing our best here at CNET News.com to ferret out more product details, but we wouldn't say no to some help. Whether you are at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or somewhere else in searchland, feel free to send along your tidbits to ina dot fried at CNET dot com. There's a lot to go through, and we're bound to miss something. Plus, not all of Ray Ozzie's thoughts get filed with the SEC.
Also, I forgot to mention this, but CFO Chris Liddell noted at this morning's financial analyst meeting that Microsoft would likely have to raise money--a first for the company--to finance its Yahoo purchase.
The past month has seen Windows Live services gathering force. At the CTIA conference (coverage) in late October, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer demonstrated a new feature in Windows Live Search for Mobile: voice-activated search (see interview with CNET News.com.) This past week, CNET editor Elsa Wenzel reviewed Microsoft's suite of Windows Live services for the desktop. In the video below, I give you a first look at Windows Live Search for Mobile in action. 5...4...3...2...1...
Live Search 411 has very similar functionality to GOOG-411. It is a voice-navigated free information service, powered by the recently acquired Tellme, that you can get to by dialing 800-CALL-411 on any phone.
Much like GOOG-411, you can find any business in a city and state of your choosing, then get its information and a map sent directly to your cell phone via a text message. You can also search by business category and connect directly to the business that you select.
The number is not yet active, and right now, you will get a coming-soon message if you try to call, so I cannot yet evaluate the service's ease of use or quality.
While Google was first to launch its 411 service and has already begun a billboard-advertising campaign in San Francisco, this is still an important launch for Microsoft. To compete with Google, the software giant needs to keep pace.
This is just one more Microsoft service that matches Google's offering. With the release of its much-improved Live Search 2.0 a few weeks ago, along with this release today, it's clear that Microsoft wants to take a real shot at dethroning the search giant.
