WebProNews

According to comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen, Bing gained ground in August, but StatCounter has released info indicating that Bing has experienced its first monthly decline in the US, in September.

StatCounter reports that Bing's share of the US search market fell by over one percentage point to 8.51% from 9.64% in August. In addition, Yahoo declined to 9.40% from 10.50%. That's not a good sign for the two companies considering their big partnership that's on the way.

"The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid August," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "The wheels haven't fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft."

Of course, where there is decline in Bing and Yahoo, there is an increase in Google market share. Google went up over two percentage points to 80.08% in September from 77.83% in August.

Bing didn't only decline in the US according to StatCounter. The search engine also experienced a global decline in market share falling to 3.25% from 3.58%. Yahoo also fell to 4.37% from 4.84% globally. Google reached 90.54%.

"Data is based on an analysis of 4.6 billion search engine referring clicks (1.1 billion from the US) which were collected during the period September 2008 to September 2009 from the StatCounter network of over three million websites," the firm explains.