Microsoft's Kumo sneaks out in public

From CNET News.com: Microsoft has begun to broaden the testing of its next-generation search technology.

For the past two months, Microsoft has been running an internal test of the technology, which is code-named Kumo. However, some of the design changes that are part of that update are now in limited public testing.

Enthusiast Ryan Rea said on Friday that he got a Live Search result that looked a lot more like screenshots of Kumo than it does to Microsoft's standard search results. Of particular note is the left-hand navigation pane, a key feature of Kumo.

Rea said he started getting the new results using Live Search in Internet Explorer 8 using the release candidate build of Windows 7.
Using the same set-up, I still get the standard result, shown in the screenshot below. Microsoft told CNET News that Rea's result page is part of the company's testing efforts.

"We are continuously looking for ways to improve Live Search for both advertisers and consumers," the software maker said in a statement. "As part of that effort, we regularly conduct public tests of certain feature sets. This is an example of one such test with a very limited audience."

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