It's time to play the numbers game again. Fresh out of the oven, the ComScore search market stats for January are here, more or less officially. The gist of it is, Bing sees another modest boost, everyone else loses. It's not much of a surprise anymore, but it's not much of a rise either, Bing got 11.3 percent of the US core search market share (which counts only the top five search engines).

Microsoft has been pouring money into its online proprieties for years now, especially in search, but doesn't really have that much to show for it. It certainly is persistent, probably for good reason too, money from its lucrative software products, Windows, Office, will start to dry up eventually, well, in a decade or so, and it knows it has to be online to survive.

If it ever pays off, it remains to be seen, but Bing is still growing some eight months after launch. Admittedly, it started from somewhat of an all-time low point for Live search, Bing's precursor, and all that it's been doing is regaining the lost ground. Bing is actually up 8.5 percent from a year ago.

If the trend continues, even at this slowish rate, it gained 0.5 percent points in January above the average growth for the past few months, it will catch up to Yahoo especially since the number two search engine in the US has been losing market share about as long as Bing has been gaining it. That is unless, of course, the two manage to merge by then.

Yahoo slipped down further, losing another 0.3 percent points dropping to 17 percent of the search market. Yahoo Search is down 21 percent from just one year ago, certainly not an encouraging number. Google, in the meantime, doesn't really have any competition but has lost 0.3 percent points from December, going from 65.7 percent to 65.4 percent. Overall, core search traffic in the US grew 12.4 percent year over year. [via BusinessInsider]