A new report has revealed that Bing recorded the biggest search growth last month. The search engine, owned by Microsoft, showed a 7% month-on-month increase and now captures almost 10% of the US search engine marker.

The Hitwise survey also found that while Google still reigns supreme with almost three-quarters of the entire search market, the giant did see a 1% drop month-on-month.

Yahoo’s share of the search market stayed around the same at just less than 15% while Ask captures just more than 2% of the market, representing a growth of 2%.

Hitwise also looked at which search engines were used for searching various categories.

•    Google was revealed to have the most visits to automotive, health, shopping and travel categories.
•    Yahoo saw gains in the automotive and shopping categories.
•    Meanwhile, Bing saw triple-digit growth in three categories – automotive, shopping and travel – including a 199% increase in the Shopping category.

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Research has revealed that organic search engine results play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked. The study by an America university found that if both a paid result and an organic result appear at the same time in a search listing then there is a greater chance of your paid result being clicked on.

It’s thought that these findings have come about because of our tendency to trust organic listings more than paid ads.

The research found:

*The impact of organic listings on paid advertising is 3.5 times stronger than vice-versa
* There is a positive link between paid and organic listings, which could increase advertisers’ profits by at least 6.15%
* Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present at the same time.

Microsoft is hoping that its new style of “simpler but smarter” searches will be enough to take on the big boys of the search engine world.

Re-branding as Bing.com, Microsoft believes the new search engine will offer strong competition for both Google and Yahoo.

Bing claims to make searching more relevant to the user by understanding the intention of searches, and grouping more related information to the original query.

So, for example, searches for a product will not only offer info about the item but will also link to reviews, accessories and online shops.

Microsoft’s plan is to reduce the amount of clicking a user has to do to find specific and related information.

Bing.com will go live first in the US and launches in beta elsewhere. Currently Google has more than 64% of the search market in the US, followed by Yahoo at 20% and Microsoft at 8.2%.