12 March 2010 | Author: D. Warburton Search Copywriter

Bing gains more market share

As Microsoft's new TV advertising campaign launches in the UK promoting Bing as an alternative to search goliath Google, the self-styled 'decision engine' has already been gaining ground in the search engine rankings, according to the latest figures from comScore.

The research firm has revealed that Bing's US market share rose by 0.2 per cent last month, after previously rising by half a per cent in January. V3 reports that Bing now holds 11.5 per cent of the US search market and is steadily catching up with Yahoo!, which dropped 0.2 per cent to take 16.8 per cent of February's search market.

This is the ninth consecutive month to see a slight gain for Bing. Six months ago, Bing only held 9.3 per cent of the US search market compared to Yahoo!'s 19.3 per cent, showing clear growing strength in Microsoft's search engine compared to Yahoo!

Unfortunately for both companies, it appears that Google's empire still stubbornly refuses to topple, as the Mountain View giant's market share has also increased across the six-month period, rising from 64.6 per cent in August to 65.5 per cent in February and accounting for 9.5 billion of 14.5 billion total searches carried out in the United States last month.

February's top five was rounded out by regular underdogs Ask.com and AOL, with the latter retaining its 2.5 per cent share and Ask.com dropping slightly from 3.8 per cent in January to 3.7 per cent last month.