Microsoft wraps Live Search in chicken and breadcrumbs
Redmond prays Kiev contents will be hot
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Microsoft has cranked up the PR machine by releasing a little more detail about the forthcoming revamp of its Google-wannabe Live Search brand.
The software vendor revealed to the Wall Street Journal yesterday that its search engine re-launch project carried the code name of Kiev.
It’s understood that Microsoft has hired London-based ad agency JWT to head up an $100m ad campaign to push its rebranded search engine, although the company has declined to comment on the alleged deal.
Up to now, Microsoft has struggled to pull in new users for its service, in part because of people failing to distinguish Live Search from the firm's other online properties.
There are several names that appear to be in the running for Redmond’s revamp of its cumbersome Live Search brand, including Kumo and, more recently, Bing.
Microsoft has registered .com and .net domains for both monikers and pointed its web servers at them too, according to the Whois database.
The company’s senior online audience biz veep Yusuf Mehdi told the WSJ that Microsoft was readying its campaign to woo users away from Google’s ubiquitous search engine.
However, Mehdi remained quiet on the finer details of the Kiev project. Instead he confirmed that Microsoft has been testing its new search engine in-house under the Kumo tag.
But the name game remains a mystery and no one is sure what way Redmond will jump with the re-brand, which is expected to launch in June. ®
COMMENTS
Is this just another rebranding?
or have Microsoft actually come up with a useful search algorithm?
My money is on a rebranding and zero improvement on they're crappy algorithm. If they think anyone in Britain is going to take a kiev seriously they they are about to get a shock as we fall over laughing our arses off and they tiny market share plummets
Good, google could use some competition
Or we'll all be on here in 3 years time ranting about how the evil empire of Google has runied blah blah blah
Wut?
So if I want news I go to msn, where I can search using live, which will now be called Kiev, or maybe not. Meanwhile if I want to see my mail I go to hotmail, which redirects to live mail, which could be called anything after the rebrand. And my MSN messenger is called Live messenger, or sometimes windows messenger depending on the version I use. But MSN as a news network still keeps going, although in order to search the news I get linked to the live news search page, which tells me news is not available in the uk, unless I go to the live news page directly at which time news is available. From Live. There are also maps. But that just links to Multimaps.
Of course, due to compatability problems all of this is done on the Microsoft internet explorer, which runs on Windows Vista.
And they think adding more brand names is a positive idea?
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