In a year, Bing and Yahoo Drag Almost 4% Market Share Away from Google

Microsoft has shown great patience with its online services, especially the search engine, and has continued to pour money into it in the hope that it will one day be worth it.

That day is not here yet, but it may be just a bit closer. Bing-powered search has managed to gain 4 percent points in the past year, according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise.

That may not seem like much, but any headway into Google's dominance is a victory. At this rate, Bing could end up with a decent slice of the search market within a few years.

Of course, by that time, search engines as we know them may be going the way of the web portal (oh, wait Yahoo.com is still here), but it's still something.

Bing and Yahoo, for which Bing has provided the search results for the past year, now command 28.99 percent of the search market in the US, according to August numbers.

That's quite a big bump from July, when the two had 28.05 percent, but it's an even bigger jump from August 2010, when they had 24.56 percent of the search market.

Still, it's got a long way to go to get close to Google, which got 65.09 percent of the searches in the US last month.

"Google accounted for 65.09 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending August 27, 2011," Experian Hitwise announced.

"The combined Bing-powered search comprised 28.99 percent of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 15.89 percent and 13.10 percent, respectively," it said.

"The remaining 64 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 5.92 percent of U.S. searches," it added.