San Francisco - Microsoft's new search engine Bing appears to be making up ground on Google, according to figures released Tuesday. But there's still a long way to go for Microsoft to present a real challenge to Google's overwhelming dominance in web search. According to web tracking firm Comscore, Bing grabbed a 9.3 per cent share of the US search engine market in August, up from 8.9 per cent in July. Google dropped 0.1 per cent in August to 64.6 per cent, while Yahoo held steady at 19.3 per cent.
Microsoft has backed its new search engine with a 100-million- dollar advertising campaign and has now seen its market share increase by at least 0.5 percentage points in the last three months. Microsoft is also hoping that its market share will increase even more when it completes its deal with Yahoo in 2010, pending regulatory approval.