It is rumored that Microsoft intends to re-brand its Live Search into Kumo next year. The company has allegedly already acquired the domain Kumo.com last week and since then has been also securing all the other variants of Kumo (.net, .jp, .fr and so on).

All these domains are now being held by CSC Corporate Domains, Microsoft's domain registrar of choice at the moment. CSC Corporate reportedly picked the domain up from semiconductor equipment supplier Schlumberger, which renounced at the domain a few years ago.

Kumo is the Japanese term for "spider" and "cloud," both words fitting the general idea of search technology. The acquiring of Kumo.com and other domains for Kumo sparked speculation that Microsoft is making a second re-branding after MSN and Live.com.

Another hint that Microsoft is taking measures to boost Live Search is that it has recently hired Sean Suchter, currently Yahoo's vice president of search technology. He will join Microsoft in late December as general manager of the company's Search Technology Center.
Most industry experts and analysts will tell you that Suchter is a big gain for Microsoft and a loss for Yahoo.

According to the latest data provided by ComScore and Citi Investment Research, Microsoft’s Live Search only owns 8.9 percent of the search market, an insignificant piece of the pie considering the fact that Google has about 63 percent of it and Yahoo has approximately 20.

The big question here is whether Kumo.com will have more success that Live.com, which reached a dead end and hasn’t grown in the past few months despite Microsoft’s programs to actually pay users for using the service.