Well, looks like Microsoft is readying it’s latest search update. The internal site is Kumo (as in www.kumo.com), but the latest speculation is that Microsoft isn’t going to go with that branding. Whatever. Ina Fried over at CNet even picked up a screenshot, which I’ll copy here:
A couple of things come to mind. First, tabs are now on the side, and there are lots of links to sections on the page. Taylor Swift web pages, songs, lyrics, biography, music, albums, videos, etc. Then there are related searches, and then a very interesting section: “your history.” So, looks like they’re finally going to start to show you your previous searches and possibly let you do something with them! It’s about time some of that work started to see the light of day! 
Another thing to notice… after every URL, there’s a “mark as spam” link… which I’m sure all the SEOs are talking about now, as this will allow them to mark their competition as spam in very entertaining ways. We’ll see how that goes.
Now, what really struck me about this look is that I’ve seen it before. In Korea. This is essentially the Naver look-and-feel:
Naver is the #1 search engine and portal in Korea, and everyone else, esp. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, aren’t even on the radar there. There are a few reasons for this, but the #1 reason is that Naver established an Answers section early (prior to their search engine if I recall), and thus they have a large knowledge base of useful answers. Yahoo Answers and Microsoft Q&A are essentially clones of Naver Answers.
Two things come to mind with this design:
1. It’s too busy.
OK, 3-column displays are back, like Ask 3D. Fine. And linked sections. OK. Now, I’m not terribly familiar with Taylor Swift, but presumably people who do queries on her are looking for fairly specific things, which is why the top relevant items should click so well, and related searches should do well. Come on, I know Microsoft has prior knowledge of what people do when they make that query. But this design ignores that in favor of bombarding the user with every facet of knowledge that is present.
2. They’re going for the women.
Huh?
Remember a year ago when Ask.com decided to abandon its quest to be a general, all-purpose search engine to everyone and just focus on women? A lot of people heaped scorn on the idea. I personally thought it was good; in any business, you need to identify and service your customer. Trying to be something, or everything, to everybody typically doesn’t go over well. And there are plenty of examples of niche search products doing well… for example, my original project, MetaCrawler, is still doing reasonable business for InfoSpace for a small cadre of a few million people that want to search multiple search engines at once. It won’t get you a trillion-dollar valuation, but it’ll make a good living for a 100-person company.
Well, when the showcase image is an entertainer, it means the features are going to be very heavily skewed towards people who want to search around and consume a lot, especially in the entertainment space. People who like Celebrity xRank, another feature Microsoft has been touting for a while. These are not features for the Microsoft Office Information Worker segment. No, these are features targeted at the same demographics as People Magazine - older women, typically stay-at-home mom, controlling the family buying. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s a great demographic to target, and People Magazine just prints money every month. But, well… really? That’s the demographic?