Struggling with less than 10% search share, Microsoft plans to rebrand Windows Live Search next year, according to an internal source.

It is reported by LiveSide that Microsoft has taken over the Kumo.com domain and has started redirecting some of its servers to it (accessible to some internal employees only). Kumo means “cloud” and “spider” in Japanese, you can see the traditional men’s kimono pictured below for a “Kumo” look-and-feel.

Japanese man in traditional kimono named "Kumo"

So, does it really mean Microsoft will relaunch its Live Search under “Kumo” brand? In fact, Live.com is now covering not only search but quite a few different services for both server-side and client-side software. It’s also known as a social network.

Mixing search with all-in-one portal like Yahoo has proven unwise idea today. People may come to Yahoo.com to do anything but less likely to search because they just do not recognize Yahoo as search engine by default.

Live.com may serve as a pure social network and personal portal for user to access email, calendar, photos and make friends delegating search to different domain. However, that new domain will be Kumo.com is still in question.