A peek at Kumo

Kumo will be a completely different search engine than the existing Windows Live engine Microsoft is using now. There is one thing though which is the same on both: the emphasis on image and videos. I've always been a fan of Live's image search and Kumo presumably will also be strong in this area.

Layout
Kumo will have a slightly different lay out than were are used to. Instead of the well known two columns Kumo will get three. The middle column will be reserved for the search results, while the right column will serve up ads.

The left column is the new one. This column will contain related searches and a single-session search history. An interesting feature on the left hand side will be the search categories, categories which are directly related to the searches your making. For example if you are looking for a song one of the categories might be lyrics, another might be tickets. A search for "iPhone" will result in apps you can download via the left side navigation.

This feature is a very interesting one because it will narrow down searches making your search more efficient.

Ads
Microsoft isn't relying on ads the way Google is. They simply don't need the money. That is one of the reasons why the focus has never really been on these ads. Serving up relevant ads has therefore never been very good at Microsoft. Apparentley the new Kumo will be a lot better at it. Having relevant ads could be one of the main success factors for a search engine. If you have enough advertisers it will probably mean you will get a lot of visitors too.

Content preview
Another interesting feature might be "Content preview" with which you can see a page before even visiting it. This feature is known to Firefox users as a plugin but Kumo will automatically be integrating this.

All in all we probably can expect a lot of Kumo. I know I'm looking forward to it.