Microsoft’s Bing has finally managed to overtake Yahoo in search share according to Nielsen. In August, Bing had a 13.9 percent share, up about .3 percent, while Yahoo dropped 1.5 percent to 13.1 percent during the same period. While its certainly a milestone for the company, in the end does it matter?

Yahoo’s search engine is now powered by Bing, so essentially the two sites are now one in the same. So in other words, Bing’s got 27 percent of the market now. Now add July’s numbers together, and you can see that together they’ve actually lost share.

So where did this share go? Some of it has gone to Google: the company saw its share rise .8 percent to 65 percent of the market, meaning that the much ballyhooed Yahoo+Bing deal isn’t doing quite what it should. Is it cause to worry for Yahoo and Microsoft? I’d argue at this point no, but the companies better hope that things turn around.

“Bing is on an unequivocal roll. It’s no longer a question of whether or not Bing will continue to grow share but one of where will future growth come from,” my colleague Joe Wilcox writes over at Betanews. “Microsoft loses by taking share from Yahoo. The gains that matter must come from Google.”

I agree with Joe — Bing cannot really celebrate these numbers because they aren’t all that positive at face value. Certainly, Bing has upward momentum, but at the same time it almost has to cheer for its competitor to at least tread water because in the end its Google that’s in its sights in the battle for search engine dominance.

 
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