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!