We've known from Microsoft's financial reports that Bing has been growing. The search engine became profitable in the third calendar quarter of 2015, and Microsoft says it has continued to grow both the market share and revenue-per-search since then.

But how big is Bing? Via OnMSFT, Microsoft tweeted yesterday that it's "bigger than you think" and provided some numbers that will probably be a surprise to many. The company claims that fully one-third of searches in the US are powered by Bing, either directly or through Yahoo or AOL (both of which provide results generated by Microsoft). Other strong markets include Taiwan, at 24 or 26 percent, and the UK, at either 23 or 25 percent (depending on which tweet you read).

Globally, the company is claiming a 9-percent market share. Google is still the runaway winner, of course, but Microsoft's numbers (using data from comScore) suggest that in at least some parts of the world, Bing is big enough to take note of. The real target for this kind of data is, of course, advertisers; by showing that Bing is actually being used by large numbers of people, Microsoft hopes that it will become more appealing to those wanting to advertise alongside search results.

But more than that, perhaps these results will cut down on the typical reaction I get when I reveal that, yes, I use Bing. So why not go for the option that's more aesthetically pleasing? Every time I tell someone I use Bing, however, the reaction is swift and consistent, "Wait, you use Bing? Nobody uses Bing! Why would you use Bing?" The consistency of this response is... well, it's like I'm living in Groundhog Day.

Yet, I like the home page graphics and the news bar along the bottom, and I find that for the most part the results are no worse than Google's. If Microsoft's numbers are to be trusted, it turns out that I am not, in fact, alone in my use of Bing. And who knows—perhaps one day Bing will not just be bigger than we think, but big enough that it won't be the butt of everyone's jokes.

Listing image by Microsoft