• VentureBeat/Silicon Alley Insider, Tuesday, March 3, 2009 11:15 AM

Microsoft is testing its new search product, codenamed "Kumo." VentureBeat's MG Siegler hopes the long-awaited upgrade to Live Search "performs better than it looks." Reviewing the screen shots obtained by Kara Swisher, who broke the story, Siegler says Kumo looks "like a product that fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Who picked this color scheme? Blue, light orange and gray? This looks like the ugly Cleveland Cavaliers' basketball uniforms from the 1990s."

In an email to Microsoft staff announcing the test, Satya Nadella, the Senior Vice President in charge of research and development for Microsoft's online services division, notes that consumers often don't find what they're looking for from today's search engines. Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget flatly disagrees. "The main reason we think Microsoft has almost no chance of clawing back any meaningful share in the search game is that, unlike Satya, we don't think today's search is crappy," he says. "On the contrary, we think it is extraordinarily good. We usually find exactly what we're looking for within seconds, and if/when we don't, we just tweak the query and try again."

That's not to say that search can't be improved, it's just that the improvement would have to be overwhelmingly good to dethrone Google -- a near impossible task, considering the search leader "does a pretty darn good job" at its core function.

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