Jul 14, 2011 13:21 GMT  ·  By

Bing is slowly creeping up in the search market in the US, but it's not really taking from Google and the progress is slow. But there is progress, that's the important part. Bing hit an all-time high in the US in June, with 14.4 percent of the market, up from 14.1 percent in May.

"Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in June with 65.5 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 15.9 percent and Microsoft Sites with 14.4 percent (up 0.3 percentage points)," comScore summed up the June market in the US.

"Ask Network accounted for 2.9 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.4 percent," it completed the round-up.

Bing and Yahoo Search, which is also powered by Bing, combined had more than 30 percent of the search market last month, for the third month running.

However, neither Google nor Yahoo budged from their positions, each getting the same exact number of searches as they did in May.

What's more interesting than the month to month changes, which are minuscule, is the yearly growth. Bing had a 40.9 percent growth in market share from a year ago. Last month, it was 45.3 bigger than it was in May 2010.

Clearly, getting to power Yahoo searches and all Microsoft's ad money are paying off. The fact that Bing is actually competitive with Google Search doesn't hurt either.

Overall, search activity is on the rise, on an year-over-year basis, since there were actually fewer searches in June 2011 than there were in the previous month.

"More than 16.7 billion explicit core searches were conducted in June. Google Sites ranked first with 10.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.7 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.4 billion. Ask Network delivered 478 million searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 239 million," comScore explained.