Microsoft's Next-Gen Search Engine Kumo Expected Next Week

From PC World: The search for Microsoft's mysterious Kumo may soon be over. According to reports Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer will unveil Redmond's latest search brand, code-named Kumo, next week at The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things D conference. Ballmer is featured speakers at the conference, which runs from May 26-28 in Carlsbad, California. News that Ballmer could unveil Kumo during the conference broke late yesterday on the All Things D blog and in today's The Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft has officially declined to comment on a Kumo debut, but the fact that the conference sponsors are scooping news on their own event suggests this rumor is either a publicity stunt or true. All Things D will only release a detailed schedule of featured speakers to conference attendees on May 26.

Microsoft employees began internal tests of Kumo earlier this year, and by March images of Microsoft's overhauled search engine leaked online. The screenshots show a three-column search results page featuring useful tools like related searches, a single-session search history for quick backtracking, and a set of search categories that relate directly to your query. Searches for a musical artist, for example, would bring up search categories like song lyrics, tickets, albums and the artist's biography, while searching for a product would bring up categories for images, reviews and manuals.

While it's hard to say what Microsoft's finished product will look like, Kumo's search categories that relate directly to your query sound a lot like semantic search to me--the ability for a computer to understand exactly what you are looking for based on your natural language query. Last year, Microsoft bought the semantic search engine Powerset, and Redmond has likely incorporated Powerset's capabilities into Kumo. In March, Google unveiled its own semantic capabilities for search, and last week, the much anticipated semantic "answer machine" Wolfram Alpha debuted. Wolfram Alpha is geared towards fact-based information and not indexing Web pages like Google or Live Search, but it shows that semantic capability is becoming the next major leap forward in search and for computers in general. No one has quite mastered semantic search yet, but they're getting closer.

View: Article @ Source Site