While my memo to Jerry Yang advising him to re-brand Yahoo search was sent a bit too late, looks like Steve Ballmer, who's Live Search suffers from the same woes as Yahoo search, got it:
Microsoft will relaunch Windows Live Search under a new brand sometime early next year, says a source within the company....Now LiveSide is saying there’s evidence the new search brand will be Kumo, which means “cloud” or “spider” in Japanese.
Creating a stand-alone search brand is just one step in the process. Differentiation in the search product is also required as is distribution. Speaking of the latter, as a commenter to my last post noted, it would be great if this wasn't a single company effort. How about a new search brand, with a differentiated product, where other highly trafficked sites - like say, I don't know, Yahoo? - sent their traffic?
Now that would be a Microsoft - Yahoo deal that made sense to everybody. It certainly would make life more interesting in the search space. Especially for the folks down in Mountainview.