According to the latest search engine market share results, Bing is gathering momentum with a 7% increase in search traffic.

The data from Experian Hitwise is collected from all US searches conducted during the month of October 2009. It is the fourth month in a row Bing has increased its market share, and it shows the people at Microsoft are chipping away at gaining a bigger share of the lucrative search and sponsored advertising market.

Google and Yahoo both experienced a 1% drop, while Ask boosted their search engine market share by 2%.

In Australia Bing has been running ad campaigns for the past several months to increase awareness, build the Bing brand and position itself as an alternative to Google — not a Google killer which some originally thought.

Overall my experience of using Bing is positive. I haven’t come across any significant problems, however when conducting a number of searches I found Google’s results to be better. Saying that, the huge gap that previously existed between Google and Live Search has pretty much disappeared.

Let’s see if Bing can reach their 20% market share goal!

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google, has announced a new partnership with Twitter.

Bing was the first out of the blocks to announce a deal. Now we see Google embracing the shift towards real-time search.

Every day there are millions of tweets on every conceivable topic, and its popularity is rapidly growing!

Paul Yiu of Bing says: “Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible. From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the web is getting more and more real time.”

Bing is currently displaying Twitter results in a cloud above its existing search results, with the more popular topics and hot trends appearing bigger and bolder than other real-time topics.

Twitter trends are only available to Bing users located in the United States, however this will be expanded over time.

Soon we will see how Google intends to display Twitter trends. . . no doubt it will be neatly wrapped in to Google Wave at some time?