Tech news is always a little slow coming off a holiday, but I saw something that caught my eye late last week that I just didn’t have time to write about until today. Microsoft’s next-generation search tool, Kumo, may be unveiled at the D: All Things Digital conference this week, as CNET’s Ina Fried said in an article on CNN.com last Thursday. It was hyped a while back because it’s supposed to be totally revamped. For instance, you can search on a topic and break down the results by category. It’s a neat idea (or I think it is, I’d like to see it in action. It sounds useful).

But Yahoo and Google are already incorporating some of the ideas from Kumo into their own search engine – and they’ve already shown their hands to the public, so any hope Microsoft might’ve had in making a splash with their new search engine may be over.

All in all, it’s a good thing. Rather than blindly returning results, the search leaders are more interested in finding out what it is you really want — it’s going to be a little more work on your part, because you’ll need to filter down your search from your initial query into even more specific results. In the long run, though, if you’re looking for something specific, this can be a really good thing.

But it would’ve been great for Microsoft if the company had been the only one out there with the technology. As Fried points out, Microsoft is in third place with 9.9 percent of the search market. And it’s a lucrative market, too. So lucrative that Microsoft may spend as much as $100 million on an advertising campaign to garner more of the search market.

It may be a moot point.  ZDNet’s Larry Dignan wrote this morning that Microsoft has registered a limited liability corporation (LLC)  in Delaware last week, which suggests that the software company might have something up its sleeve, either an acquisition or a partnership. According to Jeffries analyst Katherine Egmert, whom Dignan quotes, rumors are flying that Microsoft will acquire Citrix. However, Dignan believes it’s more likely that a partnership with Yahoo will (finally) emerge.

It’ll be interesting to see what Microsoft will show this week, if anything. If there’s a search partnership, one wonders if Kumo will ever see the light of day.  And even if the company does reveal Kumo (or Bing, or whatever Microsoft ends up calling it), it won’t be ready for the public this week. But for Microsoft, or Yahoo, or anyone else to dethrone Google as the search king in the United States, it’s going to take a better technology. And with Google’s ability to adapt to challengers (hey, look, it’s already starting to incorporate features of Wolfram|Alpha — and that’s not even a search engine!) even new technology may not matter much.

For more on these and other topics, take a look at these articles and blog posts:

How Microsoft Works
How Google Works
Google Beats Wolfram to the Punch