In hopes of bettering their competitive advantage in top tier search engines, Microsoft plans to demonstrate their newest search product, “Kumo” next week in San Diego. This highly anticipated upgrade from Live Search is currently in testing phase to be introduced later this year. Microsoft claims that the new engine will crack Google’s dominance in the search engine community by better organizing search results for consumers searching for information.

Expected enhancements to the engine include the use of semantic search (a process used to improve online searching by using data from semantic networks to generate more relevant results) utilizing Microsoft’s purchase last year of Powerset, and, according to screen shots a new aesthetic look and feel from the current Live platform.

Looking over the screenshots below you will see that the site being tested appears to be in a three column layout and has a tool that uses categories directly related to your search (contrary to Google’s “news”, “video”, etc).  Additionally, related searches and user history are predominantly displayed along with side navigation and sponsored listings on the right of the search results.

Kumo, Japanese for “Spider” and “Cloud”, may or may not be the finalized name for this product. Whichever name they select, Microsoft needs to come with a strong product if they want to stay competitive and gain market share. The latest comScore report on Monday, May 18th said Google’s share of U.S. web searches in April was 64 percent, compared with Microsoft’s 8.2 percent market share. While it has remained undeniable for some time now that in the Search hierarchy, Google ranks first, Yahoo second and Microsoft claims third, there are times when Live seems only a half step from the tier two engine level. Not only are they barely holding on to a distant third, but the release of Wolfram Alpha, among other up-and-comers, has introduced new players to the field.

Will Microsoft’s claims to give Google a run for their money come true? Will the use of semantic search and site makeover do the trick? Time will tell–and we’ll be here to talk about it.