• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 9, 2009

Microsoft is gaining ground with its search engine Bing, but Google still dominates the market. Microsoft's Bing grabbed 5.25% of the U.S. Internet search market in the four weeks ending June 27, while Google captured 74% of the market, according to data released by Hitwise Thursday.

Yahoo took 16.2% of the search market last month -- up from May, but down from the 20% in June. IAC/Interactive Corp.'s Ask.com slid to 3.2%. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis accounted for 1.36% of U.S. searches

While the percentage for U.S. searches among the leading search engines declined for all, excluding Google, Bing still continues to see growth, Hitwise says. Looking at the weekly percentage of U.S. searches for Bing, the engine has grown an average weekly rate of 25% for June 2009.

Adding in Live.com and MSN Search along with Bing, the combined search engines have grown at an average of 16 percent during June 2009. Hitwise estimates that Bing grew faster than the three other prominent search engines for the month.

Microsoft continues to chip away at market share. Whitney Burk, director at Microsoft Bing, declined to comment on the Hitwise findings, but says Microsoft believes people are not overly loyal to their search engines, and many are more than willing to switch to something new.

Microsoft research shows that 55% of people use more than one engine per week, and 60% of people are open to making the switch to another engine.

"Customers are noticing a problem with the current search experience, and while they are generally satisfied with search today, they expect to be dissatisfied more than 50% of the time with their query result," Burk says. "We think we can do better. This is why we designed Bing--to serve as a decision engine aimed at helping people get the result they want to ultimately help them make better decisions more quickly."

Overall, longer search queries have increased in popularity during the past year, too, which helps Bing return more relevant results. Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, increased 8% between June 2008 and June 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 16%.

Assisting in Bing's growth, earlier this week Microsoft reported securing a five-year deal with Verizon Wireless to support subscribers with the preloaded default search engine on mobile phones. The deal, announced in January, left consumers believing they would get Live Search instead.