Bing Closes Gap on Google’s Search Engine Lead

Bing, Microsoft’s little search engine that could, has taken 30 percent of the U.S. search market share, posing a serious threat to Google’s dominance in the field.

According to Hitwise, Bing raked in 30.01 percent in March, with 14.32 percent of those searches coming from Bing.com and the remaining 15.69 percent from Yahoo Search, which Bing has been powering since August 2010. Bing got a 6 percent increase over February, and Yahoo a 5 percent boost, but Google saw its market lead decline, going from 66.69 percent to 64.42 percent.

Business Insider notes that Bing’s 30 percent share is a symbolic number because that’s what Yahoo had back in 2005, when Microsoft first launched Bing. August 2010 is also symbolic: at the time, Google was at 71.59 percent of the U.S. search market and has since then lost roughly 10 percent.

The likelihood of Bing blasting past Google anytime in the near future is low, but Mashable did a little math and discovered that if Google continues losing two to three percent per month, and Bing continues its trend of gaining five or six percent each month, Bing could overtake Google by 2012. Not bad for a search engine that was accused of stealing results from its competition.