Hitwise, a Web analytics firm, reported that Microsoft Bing fielded more searches in June, but it still lags far behind Google and Yahoo.

Bing lost market share in June even as it handled more search queries, according to Hitwise, showing the size of the hill Microsoft has to climb.

Google remained the overwhelming favorite among search engines with 74.04 percent of the market in June -- that's up about four-tenths percent since May and nearly 5 percent from a year ago.

Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com lagged far behind Google -- with 16.19 percent, 5.25 percent and 3.15 percent of the market respectively -- and all three have lost share since last year, although Yahoo gained slightly in May.

Bing was introduced in May but is a revamp of Microsoft's previous search offering called Live Search.

Still, the number of search queries handled by Bing grew steadily in June, nearly doubling by the end of the month to 6.63 percent. Bing's average weekly growth rate was 25 percent, according to Hitwise -- faster than the growth rate of Microsoft search services (Bing, Live.com and MSN Search) combined.

"The question is, will Bing maintain that type of share through an entire month?" asked search analyst Danny Sullivan at his blog, searchengineland.com. "We'll know when July figures come out. The bigger question is whether Bing will maintain that type of share when Microsoft's ad spending ramps down."

Meanwhile, there's a flap on Twitter over Google's cache of Microsoft's outage warning for Bing's travel site, which was temporarily knocked out last weekend by an electrical fire in a data center in Seattle.

Microsoft posted the notice last week after the site went down but it still shows up as the second item on Google when Google is used to search for Bing.

Microsoft has asked Google, via Twitter, to check out its index.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on the current state of IT salaries. Download the report here (registration required).