Web fanatics are on the edge of their collective seats this week in anticipation of Microsoft’s “Google killer” search engine that’s been codenamed “Kumo.”

The software giant’s CEO is expected to announce Kumo’s release next week at Wall Street Journal’s All things D conference.

It’s been reported that Microsoft employees began internal tests of Kumo earlier this year, and by March images of it had been leaked online.

While it’s hard to say what Microsoft’s finished product will look like, Kumo’s search categories that relate directly to your query sound a lot like semantic search, which is all the rage in search-engine land these days. (For the uninitiated or just disinterested, semantic search is the capability for a computer to understand exactly what you are looking for based on your natural language query.)

Just so everyone’s clear about who the 800-pound gorilla is in this arena: In the U.S., Google sites held 64.2 percent of the search market in April, a strong lead over Yahoo!, which holds 20.4 percent market share, and Microsoft, which follows with 8.2 percent, according to comScore Inc. data. The Ask Network held 3.8 percent and AOL held 3.4 percent.

Month to month, Google’s market share gained a half percentage point, while Microsoft’s share lost by .1 percentage points.

It’s gonna take some pretty strong ammo to kill this monkey.

Tags: conference, Kumo, Microsoft, search engine, Wall St. Journal