Ending one of the worst kept secrets in Redmond, Microsoft is apparently going to publicly present its new "Kumo" branded Web search engine at the Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference in Carlsbad, Calif., next week.

The source for this news?

A blogger for D, who wrote today that "sources say the company will demonstrate it publicly for the first time at our D: All Things Digital conference next week."

The WSJ posted a similar story, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

Steve Ballmer is among the listed speakers at the conference, along with bigwigs from Yahoo, Nokia, AT&T and others.

Microsoft employees have been testing Kumo for a while and a bunch of previews have already been published. Here are some screenshots showing the redesign that Neowin posted in March and a bunch of early impressions compiled at LiveSide.

Kumo, which in Japanese means "cloud" or "spider," will have to be pretty spectacular if it's going to help Microsoft's search volume get within sight of Google's tail lights. The latest comScore report on Monday said Google's share of U.S. web searches in April was 64 percent, compared with Microsoft's 8.2 percent share.