Former Softie to take real-time social-search startup public

Ken Moss, a former General Manager of Microsoft Search, is set to take his new "social search" startup public on June 18, if all goes as planned.

Moss' new venture, a company known as CrowdEye, has been in quiet mode for the past nine months. The plan is for the company to go public tomorrow, according to Moss, who is CrowdEye's co-founder and president.

CrowdEye, a "custom-built social search engine," tracks discussions on Twitter. Here's a description of CrowdEye plans to work from the company's Web site:

"CrowdEye is a new generation of search engine which looks at the worldwide web in a new way. By tracking discussions on Twitter, we can help our users find out what’s important to them right now in real time. CrowdEye has created innovative technology to scan through tweets, retweets, twitter links and more. We then provide you with powerful yet easy ways to slice, dice, summarize and categorize the data to answer your questions. Whether you’re interested in following your brand, baseball, celebrities, movies, or anything else people are talking about – CrowdEye can help you know what people are thinking."

Moss led the Microsoft Search engineering team for five years before "taking a sabattical" in the fall of 2007. Microsoft said at the time that Moss would return to the company. He never did, and Harry Shum ended up replacing him.

I've been wondering whether Microsoft -- somewhere in the company -- also is working on some kind of real-time search engine. No word so far....