Microsoft has not been in the spotlight this much for its offerings in search for quite some time. Whether or not you think Bing is a legitimate contender in the battle for search market share, you can rest assured that all eyes are upon it.

A number of research agencies have revealed new stats reflecting the interest level in Bing. So here is something of a round up of this data.

The Hitwise Numbers

In the US, Bing became the 17th most popular website out of 450,000 once it launched, after the placeholder rested at 5,120 a week before the launch. For the week ending June 6th, Bing actually ranked number 4 out of the search engines Hitwise tracks, with Bing Image Search ranking 15th.

In Canada, Bing was ranked within the top ten among all sites during the first week, and represented 1% of all Canadian Internet visits, according to Hitwise’s Heather Dougherty. Here it ranked third in the search engine category, behind Google and Google Canada.

More interesting stats from Hitwise for the US and Canada: 

- In both countries, MSN was the leasing site referring traffic to Bing (36% and37%)

- In the US, Bing sent traffic the most to shopping and classifieds sites, followed by entertainment, and business and finance.

- In Canada, it went entertainment, social networking, then shopping and classifieds

- Facebook was the number one search term in both the US and Canada

- In both countries, 9 out of 10 searches were navigational searches for specific sites

Hitwises’s Alan Long shared some more Bing stats looking at the Asia Pacific region. In this region, Australia reacted the strongest to Bing’s launch. Australian traffic peaked on June 3rd with 5.13% share of all visits to the Search Engine category.

All of Microsoft’s search properties made up 5.4% that day, which is a 23.4% increase on the same day in 2008. Long notes, "The launch of Bing did not hurt Google’s share substantially with the monolith’s share decreasing 0.12% and Yahoo! Search declining 0.99% from the week prior to launch, week ending 23 May 2009."

"In New Zealand Bing has taken over the fourth ranking position, formerly held by the very Search Engine it replaced, Live.com," he says. "A similar story is found in Hong Kong and Singapore where Bing is now the eight and fifth ranked search engine respectively replacing Live.com in the same positions."

The StatCounter Numbers

StatCounter says that Bing has fallen back to third place behind Goolge and Yahoo, but is winning market share from them in the US and worldwide.

StatCounter analyzed search engine market share two weeks before and after the formal launch of Bing. The firm says that for the US market:

- Google decreased from 78.68% to 77.94% (-0.74%).

- Yahoo decreased from 11.46% to 10.76% (-0.7%)

- Microsoft (Bing, MSN Search and Live Search) increased from 7.4% to 9% (+1.6%)

"It is too early to say what the long term result will be but this is a creditable performance by Bing," says StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen. "It remains to be seen what happens to Bing after user curiosity and the reported $100m advertising budget runs out."

The Compete Numbers

In an email from a spokesperson for Compete.com, WebProNews was told:

- To date it appears there has not been a noticeable shift in Query Market Share towards Bing.com if we aggregate pre-Bing MSFT search and track through the launch.  Essentially Bing.com is tracking with prior MSFT market share levels.

- MSFT search’s user base increased fairly dramatically on the day of the Bing.com launch.  A significant volume of new users tried out Bing and that continues to remain elevated.  However to date this increase does not appear to be pulling users from Google or Yahoo! as their user bases remain essentially flat.

- It appears that to date a fair number of Google and Yahoo users are testing out Bing.com in parallel with Yahoo and Google as they go about their typical searching.

The comScore Numbers

Research from comScore showed a substantial improvement in Microsoft’s position in the search market in the days following Bing’s launch. According to them, Microsoft increased its average daily penetration among US searchers from 13.8% to 15.5%

Microsoft’s share of search results pages in the U.S. increased from 9.1% to 11.1%.

"These initial data suggest that Microsoft Bing has generated early interest, resulting in a spike in search engagement and an immediate term improvement to Microsoft’s position in the search market," said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president.

So, have you had enough yet? To be perfectly honest, I’m more interested in what the numbers will look like several months from now, once the initial Bing hysteria wears down. Perhaps at that point, we can see how worried the competitors should really be.