Microsoft Bing's Banner Week: Adds Twitter, Goes After Google

First came word that Bing is starting to creep up on Google. Though Microsoft lags a ways behind Google in the battle of the monopolies, the Bing search engine has managed to gain Microsoft a sliver more market share as it fights to catch up with industry leader Google.

According to a report from StatCounter Global Stats, a Web traffic analytics firm, Microsoft managed to nab 8.23 percent of search engine market share in June, its first month in existence. That's not too shabby, considering search engine fixture Yahoo only managed to pull down 11.04 percent market share for the same month.

Yeah, it's not Google numbers -- 78.48 percent market share -- but it's a start, and a pretty impressive one.

Microsoft, with the help of Bing, was able to increase its market share by more than 1 percentage point from April, taking away nearly a full point from Google.

"At first sight, a 1 percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing, but the underlying trend appears positive," said Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter's CEO, in a statement. "Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date."

On top of taking a 1 percent market-share jump, Microsoft also this week revealed that it's offering realtime Twitter search capabilities through Bing.

While Microsoft Bing's new Twitter search capability is limited to searching just the most prominent and most prolific Twitterers, it's a big boost for the search engine, since other search engines and search providers don't index Twitter at all, but only display a link to a person's Twitter page or show some older Twitter messages. Microsoft Bing offering the ability to see individual updates in realtime, along with other search results, is a big advancement and competitive advantage, despite how limited it is.

"We're not indexing all of Twitter at this time, just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start," Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft's Silicon Valley Search Technology Center, wrote in a blog post. "We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of Tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter's public API to surface Tweets in people search. We'd love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in realtime search."

The Microsoft Bing search engine's small victories come as Microsoft continues to run a series of television advertisements targeting the competition, mainly Google, showing zombified people spouting nonsensical facts and data as a result of search overload.