New figures from US Internet monitoring firm ComScore has revealed that Bing, Microsoft’s latest attempt at gaining a foothold in the consumer search space, saw its market share rise from 8.9% in July to 9.3% in August.
Google still leads the way with 64.6% of the US market, although its share dipped one percentage point.
According to the BBC, although Bing’s improvement is small, it is a significant increase for a new entrant to the market.
Figures released by UK firm Nielsen have revealed that the number of searches on Bing in the UK increased 5% during August, while Google searches slipped 1.7%.
“It is a very tiny ripple but reflects that Microsoft has done a lot of marketing around it and that people are curious about anything new that is launched,” Alex Burmaster, communications director at Nielsen, said on the BBC.
Bing was launched in May 2009 to replace the much-maligned Microsoft Live search engine. The Redmond giant said it wanted to make search results more relevant, so for example a search for flight information will reveal schedules and times as well as results for local hotels and weather information.
It was rumoured at the time that Microsoft was looking to spend $80m – $100m on marketing Bing.
