Microsoft Bing has skyrocketed to the number two position in search on the US market, surpassing Yahoo. According to statistics provided by StatCounter, Bing has climbed higher on the cadaver of Live Search in just a week after the Redmond company started the rollout worldwide than the now defunct search engine has ever managed in its years of life. StatCounter has Bing overtaking Yahoo with a market share of 16.28%. Yahoo, the traditional runner-up to Google, has slipped into third place with a share of 10.22%, while the Mountain View search giant still accounts for 71.47%. Globally Yahoo isn't faring all that better, with a share of just 5.13%, compared to Bing's 5.62% and Google's 87.62%.

The worldwide rollout of Bing started on May 28, 2009, and ended June 3rd. On June 1st, market analysis firm Net Applications indicated that within hours of the new Microsoft search engine going live it grabbed a market share of over 6%. Undoubtedly the hype associated with the launch of the new search engine is responsible for the Bing market share explosion. It will be interesting to see whether Bing can maintain the same growth momentum, which is highly unlikely, or at least whether it will be able to convert Yahoo and Google users.

In April 2009, ahead of the launch of Bing, comScore had Google at 64.2% of the US market, Yahoo at 20.4% and Live Search at just 8.2%. For the same month Nielsen Online credited Google with 64.0% of the search engine market in the US, Yahoo with 16.3% and Live Search with 9.9%. But fact is that Yahoo represents nothing more than a stepping stone for Microsoft. Leapfrogging past Yahoo is a bitter sweet victory for the Redmond company, as with the audiences from the two search engines combined the Yahoo-Bing(Live Search) Frankenstein would have been a force worthy to challenge Google.

Once the hype will be over and the dust will have had a chance to settle on Microsoft's new search engine, only then will Bing debut on its Sisyphean journey to catch up with Google. And Google has quite a head start, since it's nothing short of synonymous with Internet search. Still, Microsoft might have a panacea for this. It is slapping a label of information overload on all Internet search before Bing via marketing, and Google is bound to be the heaviest hit.