Looking to better fight back against Google and Yahoo, Microsoft spokespeople have confirmed the company is working on a new online search service that is being internally tested.

Kumo, a Japanese word meaning both "spider" and "cloud," is not available to the public, but it's possible Kumo.com will eventually be opened up to the public.

"Kumo.com exists only inside the corporate network, and in order to get enough feedback we will be redirecting internal live.com traffic over to the test site in the coming days," a memo posted by Satya Nadella said.  "Kumo is the codename we have chosen for the internal test."

A Twitter post and blog entry posted on the The Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog first confirmed the existence of Kumo.com, which provides an “access denied” error to anyone outside the Microsoft network.

Although many casual internet users may believe the search engine market is rather stagnant at the moment, Google, Yahoo and others still have a lot of time and resources invested in making search even better.

Google currently dominates 63 percent of the search engine, with Yahoo trailing at 21 percent, and Microsoft rounding out the top three with just 8.5 percent.  It's still possible Microsoft and Yahoo will work out a deal for the Redmond-based company to purchase Yahoo's search business -- but it's an extremely smart move, analysts agree, for Microsoft to move forward on its own.

Furthermore, Microsoft faces competition overseas from Google and home grown search engines -- i.e. Baidu's operations in China.

"We believe we can provide a better and more useful search experience that helps you not just search but accomplish tasks," Nadella continued in the memo.  "An explorer pane on the left side of results pages will give you access to tools that help you with your tasks."

Microsoft will reveal more details about its live search engine in the coming weeks.