Microsoft's new search engine Bing -- referred to by the company as a "decision engine" -- is taking search market share from Google, Yahoo, and Ask, but its gains remain underwhelming.

According to NetApplications, an online metrics firm, Google's global search market share declined by 0.3% in June, while Yahoo lost 0.17% search share, and Ask saw a 0.1% drop.

Yet Bing hasn't proven to be a runaway hit. Google remains the leader in global search market share by a huge margin at 81.22%, followed by Yahoo at 9.21%, Bing at 5.31%, AOL at 1.74%, and Ask at 0.84%.

This is more or less where Bing was when it launched, at least by NetApplication's measure. The company puts Microsoft's overall search share -- Bing, Live, and MSN -- at 6.02% in June, up from 5.43% in May.

StatCounter, a Web metrics firm based in Dublin, Ireland, reports that Microsoft has gained 1% in search market share. "Microsoft had 8.23% market share in June, behind Yahoo! at 11.04%," the company said in a blog post. "Google still dominates the U.S. market but has fallen back slightly from 79.07% in April to 78.48% in June."

Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, described Bing's upswing as "steady but not spectacular." Hitwise, another online metrics company, paints Bing in a less impressive light but makes Yahoo look like a far stronger contender. For the four weeks ending on June 27, 2009, it measured Google's share of searches at 74.04%, Yahoo's at 16.19%, Bing's at 4.99%, and Ask's at 3.15%.

ComScore, yet another Web metrics company, reported last month that Microsoft's share of search results pages in the U.S. reached 12.1% between June 8 and June 12, a 3% rise from the week of May 25-29 when Bing was introduced.

Overall, these numbers suggest that Bing is a strong offering from Microsoft. However, strong may not be enough. A recent survey by the Catalyst Group, a New York-based design firm, found that despite a preference for Bing's warmer home page design, respondents preferred Google to Bing 2 to 1. Despite finding search result relevance to be about the same, most respondents said they planned to continue using Google rather than switch to Bing.

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