Microsoft's Live Search engine, originally MSN Search, has long been considered a potential candidate for rebranding. Now TechCrunch reports that Live Search will be given a new name sometime early next year. And LiveSide.net has done some extensive digging and found that Microsoft has taken control of the Kumo.com domain name.

Could that be the new name? LiveSide isn't yet making that call: "While Microsoft employees have admitted publicly that there are branding issues around Live Search, we’re not quite ready to stick our heads above the parapet and say that Kumo will be the new brand name to be announced in a 2009 update," the site reports.

As noted previously by Mary Jo Foley, the name Kumo means "cloud" or "spider" in Japanese. That's appropriate for a search engine -- or perhaps for something else, like a cloud-computing initiative. Of course, Microsoft already has the name "Azure" for that.

When we recently asked Microsoft search engineering chief Satya Nadella about the possibility of a name change, he didn't commit. But the language he used suggested that there could be something more in the works: "I don't have any comments at this point," he said.

What do you think? Is a name change in order? Would Kumo be a good name? What else should it be called? And how much does the brand really matter in Microsoft's uphill climb against Google? Post your thoughts in the comment below.