Microsoft has worked hard to differentiate Bing from Google and even Yahoo by including many unique features like social integration and its prediction engine. But the only metric that matters is usage share and for June, it looks like Bing is on the right path as it has increased to 19.2% of the search engine market, up from 18.8% in May and 18.7% in April for the US market. The search metrics do not include mobile search and are limited to desktop usage share.

The other news, which may be a bigger indicator of search trends than Bing's gains, is that Yahoo is down. For the months of April and May, Yahoo was stuck at 10% flat but for June, it dipped to 9.8% in the US. It's not hard to see that Bing is taking Yahoo's native search share for the month which is actually a big win for Microsoft.

Even though Bing and Yahoo use the same backend to produce the search results, both services are still trying to attract users to their domain to generate the search. In short, Bing was able to steal a bit of traffic from Yahoo for the month of June.

Google, of course, is still the top player in the market and held firm at 67.6% of the market which is the same share it has had for the past two months in the US.

So what we have here is Yahoo and Bing fighting it out for second place but all indicators are pointing to the fact that Bing is winning the war against Yahoo for native search traffic. While Google has remained firm at the top, Bing is slowly closing in on the usage share but will soon have to find a way to attract Google users as you can only cannibalize Yahoo so much before there is nothing left to take.

Source: Search Engine Land