Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has made impressive gains in market share since launch. According to comScore Inc Bing’s Market share grew 4.5 % between July and August, giving it a total share of 9.3%, not bad for a search engine that only launched on the first of June. This puts Bing in third place behind Yahoo (19.3%) and Google (64.6%).

So at who’s expense i this growth coming from AOL seems to be one of the big losers down an undisclosed amount to just 3%. Google fans however seem to have remained loyal, with Google losing only  0.1% of its market share.

Neilson however reported that Bing had grown its share by 22.1% to give it a total market share of 10.7%, surprisingly though it showed Google growth of 2.6 % to a total of 64.6%.

Either way the message is the same Bing is to be taken seriously and want to take market share away from Google. Product differentiators are arising for example Bing recently launched Visual Search which allows users to browse search results as images as opposed to text.

Perhaps most the most interesting development is Microsoft’s continued courting of Yahoo. Microsoft has proposed that Bing be the default search in Yahoo. This would dramatically change the competitive landscape but will have to pass anti-trust and competition regulators first. Such a combined force may just be needed to really compete. Google however is aware of this threat and will no doubt not taking it lying down. According to New York Post Google has in response assembled a small team of top engineers led by Sergey Brin himself to try determine how Bing search algorithm differs from Google’s. Google clearly follows the activities of its competitors as the launch of Google Squared in response to Wolfram Alpha shows. Google squared shows the search results in a spread sheet format.

Being a Microsoft product I was averse to Bing, but having tested it a little must admit it’s not actually all that bad. See one of our previous articles here, shows you how to do a blind test and compare the results of the three big search engine. My scores where Google (6) Bing (4) Yahoo (2).

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