You might have noticed that Microsoft’s ads for its Bing search engine have become much more frequent on our pages as of late. I’ve noticed elsewhere a marked increase in advertisements for the service, which seems to imply that Microsoft may be staging another offensive in the war over search.

Data from StatCounter shows that Bing had an fairly impressive 13.2 percent share on Tuesday, its highest point in over two months — which was shortly after launch — and continuing a marked uptrend that began on Monday. It appears that Bing’s new-found traffic is generally coming from Google, as Yahoo has generally maintained its share throughout Bing’s rises and falls.

(That said, Google still dominates about 75 percent of the search market in the US, with Yahoo around 10 percent as of Tuesday.)

What remains to be seen is whether Microsoft can hold onto these gains. Given its past history, it probably won’t, although it seems that its wild swings are beginning to smooth out over the past few weeks. This is probably a result of more web consumers settling into using Bing on a regular basis rather than flipping back and forth between its competitors.

Microsoft may also be noticing this stabilization, and may see it as a good time to attempt to pry more eyes away from Google, thus the increase in Bing ads once again.

In any case, the service still has a far way to go before it can be considered relevant in the search engine space. With Google so dominant, especially worldwide, Microsoft has a lot of work to do.

Note that worldwide Google has 88.6 percent of the market, dwarfing Bing and Yahoo’s shares which are roughly tied at 4.7 percent each.

 
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