Ding with the Bing

Searches conducted on Microsoft’s Bing increased 21 percent in January 2011, though Google and Yahoo held on to the top spots in terms of search engine share. Bing captured 12.81 percent of the market, Google had 67.95% and yahoo stood second with 14.62%. In terms of paid clicks, Amazon was king, capturing 11.25 percent of all paid clicks.

Bing and Yahoo were the most successful, with about 82 and 81 percent success rates, respectively. Google had about 66 percent. Bing was the big gainer in year-over-year search activity, picking up 29% more searches in 2010 than it did in 2009. But Google, despite already having a huge lead in the market, also picked up 13% more searches last year.

Bing’s app is the best general search app for the iPhone. It does more inside the app without launching other programs, it adds a new type of image search, and it feels more cohesive. Bing’s iPhone app gives almost exactly the same results as you’d find in a desktop search. When you scroll down through a basic search, you see results from the Web, images, businesses, news, and suggestions for other searches. Bing’s image search is one of its best features. When you scroll through image results, you never have to change pages—the results just keep coming until there are no more. Bing for iPhone supports voice search, too.