Microsoft Bing Continues To See Growth

Calling the fight for search engine market share might be premature, with Google clearly still lord of its domain, but Microsoft's Bing continues to slowly make strides against the search engine giant that may eventually cause its rival to take serious notice.

Microsoft's Bing search engine captured 8.8 percent of the search engine market in September, up from 8.7 percent in August, according to a new report from Compete, a Web analytics company. Google continues to dominate the search engine market with 72.6 percent of all searches performed in September done through the Mountain View, Calif.-based giant; Yahoo ranked third with 14.7 percent of searches.

Google, like Bing, also grew from month to month, outpacing its Redmond, Wash.-based competitor, with 0.3 percent growth, from 72.3 percent in August to 72.6 percent in September, according to Compete.

Yahoo, on the other hand, was the biggest loser in the search engine market share race. The company saw its query volume drop 8 percent from 1.98 billion searches in August to 1.82 billion in September, contributing to its market share dropping from 15.8 percent to 14.7 percent.

Google wasn't immune to volume losses either, falling 0.6 percent month to month. Bing's queries were strong enough through September to attribute for 8.2 percent of growth, reaching 1.15 billion searches last month, up from 1.07 billion searches in August.

Aside from Bing, The only other search engine to experience volume growth from August to September was Ask.com, which grew 1.3 percent to 320 million queries.