According to various rumors and reports, Microsoft’s search engine, known as Live Search will be rebranded as Kumo, as early as next year.

Apparently, the new name was already transferred from registrar to Microsoft and now Kumo.com points to a Microsoft’s internal test site.

Earlier this year during the Search Marketing Expo conference, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division, hinted about a possible change of the company’s “Live” brand.

In Johnson’s opinion having multiple identities for the same online services such as MSN Hotmail and Windows Live Hotmail or Windows Live Messenger and MSN Messenger is confusing for the users.

In addition, Johnson explained that a brand “fix” is needed as Microsoft decided to drop its bid for Yahoo and improve its Live Search engine.

However, it remains to be seen if Kumo will be the new name of Mcirosoft’s search engine or if the compaby is trying to create just another service.

Kumo means in Japanese “cloud” and some reports are pointing out that maybe it could be related to Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative.

Launched in 2005, Live Search, Microsoft’s effort to catch up with the web giant Google, had replaced MSN Search in 2006. Despite the company’s efforts, Live Search acquired only 11 percent of the search market, far behind its main competitor, Google.

Last year Microsoft’s Live Search has gone through a major technical update, dubbed as “the biggest update since our debut in January 2005.” Redmond’s engineers have focused on improving the relevance and they apparently achieved that by quadrupling the size of Live Search’s index.

Microsoft said at the time that it had come up with a new way of extracting data from the Web which automatically adds information from specific domains to the data base, including ratings and reviews; businesses (locations, contact information, photos, hours of operation, ratings and reviews); celebrities (buzz, images and videos) and more.

In the past two years, Microsoft has launched several online services branded as “Live” such as Windows Live Hotmail or Windows Live Messenger.

In the past few months, Microsoft announced various initiatives regarding search engines. For example the Redmond-based company has acquired Powerset, a start-up semantic search engine and announced various project like Microsoft Live Search Cashback.