On May 20th, we reported here in the search engine optimization blog an announcement that Microsoft would soon be unveiling a new search platform. It was to be called Kumo and be on display at a digital tech conference that took place last week – that’s what we thought was going to happen anyway.
At the conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made an announcement – the Kumo name has been replaced with Bing, a totally rebranded search engine. MSN Live Search will be phased out with this change, which has consistently been far behind Google and Yahoo! in terms of search numbers.
A commentary at Search Engine News does not interpret this move to be smart on Microsoft’s part. Basically, professional SEOs shouldn’t take these developments too seriously. Microsoft has strayed away from the user-driven solutions that have worked well for them, like Office and their acquisition of Hotmail in the 1990′s.
According to a discussion thread at Webmaster World, Bing is supposed to go live this Wednesday, June 3rd.
We’ll continue to monitor Bing and report here any useful functions that can help optimize your website and yield conversions.