WITHOUT our really noticing it, the word ?Google? has crept into everyday use as a verb to mean ?look up on the Internet.?

?Why don?t you Google him?? is something you might say if you wanted to dig up more information about someone. Of course, the word has become generic to a degree because a typical Internet search will quickly bring you to multiple sources. Still, much to the chagrin of its competitors, Google is most often the first stop in these online searches, giving the company dominance in search-based advertising.

Microsoft, which has been languishing for years in distant third place, last week started testing Kumo, an update to?and possible re-branding of?its Live Search (www.live.com) service.

Kumo is supposed to be Japanese for ?spider? or ?cloud? but it?s unclear at this point if this will become the official brand for Microsoft?s search service. Unfamiliar as the word is, it is at least more distinctive than the bland ?Live? label that Microsoft has attached to all things Web-related.

News of Kumo surfaced after CNET and other Web sites published screen shots of the refurbished search page and a memo from Microsoft?s Internet search executive, Satya Nadella, urging the software company?s employees to test out the service and provide feedback to the team that?s developing it.

The screen shots show a three-column results page, with a menu of tools on the left panel that can filter results by type (images, songs, lyrics, biography, music, albums, videos), and provide links to related searches and the user?s search history. The middle column categorizes search results by search type,including images and video. The right-most column carries Google-type text ads. All in all, a clean, uncluttered look.

Nadella?s memo gives us a glimpse of what Microsoft?s game plan is and also reveals how it sees online search as it is today:

?In spite of the progress made by search engines, 40 percent of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46 percent of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes. These and many other learnings suggest that customers often don?t find what they need from search today.

?We believe we can provide a better and more useful search experience that helps you not just search but accomplish tasks.?

I?m not sure where Nadella gets his figures and I have no alternative data to dispute his conclusions, but my own experiences with Internet search has by no means been so unsatisfactory. Certainly, when I search on Google?I get relevant results more than 60 percent of the time, and most of my searches don?t last even five minutes.

For my requirements, a good Internet search engine needs to do only one thing very well: find relevant results quickly. Tweaking the results page so that it looks neater or better is of little interest to me, especially if it slows down the process. The Google results page isn?t pretty, but there are no graphics or formatting commands to slow the search down, and it?s very easy to jump to the next page for more results.

A more promising avenue for competing with Google is to find a way to incorporate results from the deep Web, the massive amounts of information buried in online databases, far down in dynamically generated sites that standard search engines, including Google, do not find. Then at least it would be competing in terms of content, not presentation.

It?s too early to say if people will want to ?Kumo? something instead of Googling it, but Microsoft has its work cut out for it. After failing to buy market share through a hostile takeover attempt at Yahoo, the software giant is still desperately trying to play catch-up. The latest figures from comScore for January 2009 show Google with 63 percent of the market, Yahoo with 21 percent and Microsoft with just 8.5 percent.

This is not to say that Google is perfect, but as Microsoft knows all too well from its operating system business, you don?t have to be perfect or the best to be No. 1.

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