Microsoft’s Bing search engine overtook Yahoo in the United States on Thursday, according to StatCounter. The last time Bing overtook Yahoo on a single day was on June 4, shortly after its launch, the Dublin-based Web analytics firm said. Bing grabbed 12.9 percent of the U.S. market versus Yahoo’s 10.15 percent share, but both are still well behind market leader Google at 74.99 percent, reported StatCounter, which bases its research on an analysis of 1.316 billion search-engine referring clicks — including 336 million from the U.S. “While (Bing’s) lead over Yahoo may not last into next week, our data suggests that it is slowly but surely closing the gap,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen. At Google’s Expense StatCounter reported earlier this month that Bing helped Microsoft increase its share of the U.S. search market by one percentage point during June. Overall, Microsoft held an 8.23 percent share last month, trailing far behind Google (78.48 percent) and Yahoo (11.04 percent).

Cullen said the latest data indicate Bing’s success is coming at Google’s expense. “We can see that Bing is gaining very slowly, but it is gaining, and the data is almost a mirror image in that when Bing goes up, Google goes down and vice versa,” Cullen said. “But Yahoo remains very steady — it’s not losing any share.” Other recent reports suggest that Google users in particular seem to be looking for a viable alternative to the current search-engine market leader. “In the first week following the announcement of brand Bing — but still before the official June 1 launch — 97 percent of visitors to Bing.com overlapped with Google, compared with only 37 percent and two percent overlap with Yahoo and AOL, respectively,” said Taylor Holsinger at Web analytics firm Compete.com. “During launch week, the dramatically larger overlap of Bing Googlers continued, relative…

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Bing Appears Ready To Grab Yahoo’s Search Ranking