I have Live Search (www.live.com) set as my home page in IE8. I like that it is small and most often if I am opening the web browser it is to search for something. I just opened a new browser and saw that my home page was redirected to the kumo beta search engine (www.kumo.com). I haven’t done more than a couple of searches and so I don’t have a complete review of the results but it looks like the same results as before with a new UI. I really like the new link on search results to mark the result as spam. I am not sure what it does but I did go out and do a vanity search to remove a certain site that has always been about 8 or 9 in the rankings and always tries to download something. I was impressed to find that particular site doesn’t show up any more in the results (at least not in the top 50). I am happy for that improvement if nothing else.

Note: I have not been able to duplicate this experience after rebooting my machine. I will keep looking for the public release of kumo.com but for now it just returns a blank page to me.