Microsoft Bing Investments Starting to Pay Off In Market Share Gains

Microsoft's Bing search engine continues to make incremental gains in search share, with new numbers bringing Bing's share closer to double digits.

Microsoft has invested heavily in improvements to Bing, including in recent months a deal to index Twitter tweets. More recently, Microsoft started providing search using the algorithms from WolframAlphra, the so-called "computational knowledge engine," for health-centric searches like body mass index and nutritional facts.

Data from Comscore for October 2009 puts Microsoft's Bing at a 9.9 percent share of U.S. Web searches -- an increase of four percent from Bing's September share.

Dominant search platform Google also gained half a percentage point month to month, jumping to a 65.4 percent share of October searches, up from 64.9 percent in September.

Yahoo lost market share, dropping to 18 percent in October, down from 18.8 percent in September, according to Commscore.

Total overall searches grew as well, up 3 percent between September and October, Comscore reported.

Comscore's monthly share measurements are but one report, but there is consensus among other market researchers that Bing is indeed gaining. Recent numbers from Experian Hitwise show Bing gaining 8.96 percent month-to-month and closing out October with a 9.57 percent market share to Google's 70.60 percent share. Hitwise's data also shows Yahoo declining, down to 16.14 percent.

The Microsoft Bing vs. Google Search battleground is yet another front in the ongoing rivalry between the two companies. That rivalry got another jolt earlier this month when Google CEO Eric Schmidt, told Fox Business that Google sees itself as "a disruptor" and "hopefully...won't repeat the mistakes that Microsoft made 10 years ago" with some of its own technology pushes.

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