Microsoft's Bing search engine continued its story of incremental gains into 2010, according to new data from analytics company ComScore, which said Bing had climbed from 11.3 percent of the U.S. search market in January to 11.5 percent in February. Google also gained slightly during that time period, from 65.4 percent to 65.5 percent, and Yahoo dipped from 17 percent to 16.8 percent.

Extrapolating further on the whole "Bing gains, Yahoo falls" trend, Jefferies & Co. analyst Youssef Squali indicated in a March 10 research note that Bing has enjoyed 350 basis points of growth since June 2009, even as Yahoo declined by 330 basis points since May 2009. I had to look up the actual definition of a "basis point" (it's an investor term for "one-hundredth of a percentage point"), but the gist is pretty clear: Yahoo is in trouble, and Bing is managing to carve out its own territory despite "Google" being synonymous with "search" in many peoples' minds.

My colleague Clint Boulton, in his March 10 article on this very topic, quotes from Squali's research note: "[Microsoft's] 350 [basis points] gain in search share post its launch is an indicator of sustainable traction. With Yahoo's traffic added to its own in late [second half of 2010], Bing should become a viable competitor to Google, with 28 percent market share--a duopoly most advertisers welcome."

That "Yahoo's traffic added to its own" line is a reference to Microsoft and Yahoo's 10-year search and advertising deal, which will see Bing power Yahoo's back-end search while Yahoo takes over a portion of the two companies' worldwide advertising sales duties.

As Boulton points out, quoting from a March 10 research note from FBR Capital Markets, Bing is also about to begin a push into foreign markets. It will be interesting to see whether Bing can experience the same slow but steady traction on a global scale as it did in the United States; Google seems in bad odor at the moment with a number of different sectors over privacy and antitrust concerns, which may also have an effect on how the market-share battle continues to play out in 2010.

What do you think?