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Bing grabs 10 percent of search market

Microsoft's new search tool breaks out of single digits, accounting for 10.7 percent of the market in August with 1.1 billion unique searches, Nielsen says.

Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.
Lance Whitney

Microsoft's new Bing search service is the fastest-growing U.S. search engine among the top 10, according to a Nielsen report released Monday.

The total amount of searches on Bing rang in at 1.1 billion for the month of August, a leap of 22.1 percent over July, winning Microsoft a 10.7 percent share of the search engine market.

Google remained in the top spot with a commanding 64.6 percent share, accounting for 7 billion searches in August, a gain of 2.6 percent over July. Yahoo saw its search results drop 4.2 percent for the month to 1.7 billion, earning it 16 percent of the market.

Top 10 search providers for August 2009
Nielsen

Other players in the top 10 included AOL Search in fourth place with 333 million searches and Ask.com Search in fifth with 186 million searches.

Similar studies have also seen a boost in Microsoft's search business. An August report from ComScore discovered that Microsoft's share of the global search engine market lept 41 percent from July 2008 to July 2009. Bing was introduced in May, taking the place of Microsoft's Live Search.

Earlier this week, Microsoft showed off a "visual search" feature for Bing that returns thumbnail images for at least some search results. Microsoft reportedly will be debuting a Bing 2.0 sometime soon sporting a variety of new features.