If you’re looking for information on how to fix your credit score through Microsoft’s search engine Bing, you might get warned that many of the links you’ll encounter are, in fact, scams.

It’s a new campaign devised to protect users from getting scammed; Microsoft worked with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Postal Inspection Service, and Western Union to provide public service announcements (PSAs) in the form of ads onBing results pages.

The ads should appear for relevant keywords only; I’ve tried about a dozen different combinations, and haven’t seen them, but it could be because I’m not located in the USA. You should see them if you’re looking for foreclosure rescue, lottery, and fixing credit problems. If you click on one, you’ll land on trade commission or Microsoft Web pages containing advice about avoiding online scams.

The initiative might move to other search engines, too. “We’ll encourage other search engines to follow Microsoft’s lead and use PSAs to help their users avoid scams,” said David Vladeck, director of the FTC bureau of consumer protection. Be that as it may, this is another move by Microsoft that shows they’re serious about grabbing more of that search market share, something they’ve been surprisingly good at so far.

Popularity: 2% [?]

       

Microsoft’s Bing search engine, after incremental gains in U.S. search engine market share throughout the summer, experienced a slight dip, according to a small number of research firms. Despite that one-month fall in its numbers, Bing has positioned itself for long-term competition with archrival Google, thanks in part to Microsoft’s search partnership with Yahoo.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine saw its September share of the U.S. market slip to 8.5 percent from 9.6 percent in August, while Google’s share hit 80 percent, according to a new report from analytics firm StatCounter.

According to StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen, the trend for Bing has been downward since mid-August: “The wheels haven’t fallen off, but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft.” Redmond’s new partner in search, Yahoo, also saw its market share decline from 10.5 percent in August to 9.4 percent in September.

Statistics firm Net Applications similarly found that Bing’s share of the market had hit 3.39 percent for September, down incrementally from 3.52 percent the previous month. In its estimation, Google dipped roughly the same amount, from 83.33 percent in August to 83.13 percent in September.

Should Microsoft be worried?
The answer is most likely no.

To accompany Bing’s June 3 rollout, Microsoft spent some $80 million to $100 million in a massive ad campaign that utilized both traditional and online channels. That money helped Microsoft make incremental gains in the search engine space throughout the summer, eventually claiming 10.7 percent of U.S. online searches in August, according to one study done by research firm Nielsen.

Bing also received another publicity boost when it became a crux of the partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo, announced on July 29, which will see Microsoft powering Yahoo’s search apparatus. Once actualized in 2010, that deal will conceivably raise Bing’s search engine market share to close to 30 percent, nearly half that of Google.

In a Sept. 14 question-and-answer session at New York’s Jefferies Annual Technology Conference, Charles Songhurst, Microsoft’s general manager of corporate strategy, said Bing still has room to grow, particularly in an international context.

“It’s active and usable, but it hasn’t had the marketing push behind it [worldwide]. And what we’ve found is that that marketing push makes a huge difference,” Songhurst said. “I think the other thing we’re beginning to find is that the search market is more differentiated, and less homogeneous, than we thought.”

Microsoft’s massive ad campaign is likely winding down, meaning that Bing will inevitably level off as users no longer find themselves subjected to “brand awareness” via omnipresent advertising.

But one month does not a trend make, necessarily, and the introduction of new features by both Microsoft and Google may slightly influence those market share numbers in the weeks and months ahead. For its own part, Google recently expanded its Search Options with the ability to filter results by past hour, specific date range, shopping sites, visited pages, books, blogs and news.

The biggest challenge facing Microsoft may lie in trying to figure out how to take best advantage of its Yahoo deal, in order to better leverage Bing’s increased presence against Google.

That deal “will have to demonstrate major future synergies if it is to make any dent in Google’s dominance,” StatCounter’s Cullen said in a statement soon after the announcement of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal in July.

Microsoft has also publicly positioned itself strongly behind the Bing brand, making it unlikely that Redmond will give up on supporting and funding the search engine anytime soon. Bing is “as good a view of our tenacity and commitment as anything you’ve ever seen,” CEO Steve Ballmer told the audience at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans in July.

“Man, oh man, have we taken a lot of abuse, and we’re still just an itsy-bitsy part of the market,” Ballmer added at the time, “but we have a little bit of mojo.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

       

Microsoft’s Bing continues to show strength as comScore Inc. is set to report this afternoon that the new search engine increased its share of the competitive market by 4.5% between July and August. Bing held a 9.3% share of the market at the end of August to hold third place, according to comScore.

And comScore is reporting that the share held by market leader Googleslipped 0.1% to hold 64.6% of the market at the end of last month.

ComScore also reports that Yahoo maintained its second-place spot in the search business with a solid 19.3% share. AOL’s share dropped an unspecified amount to 3% of the market.

Today’s report comes on the heels of last week’s report from The Nielsen Co. that three-month-old Bing saw its share of the search market grow by 22.1% between July and August. Neilsen said its research concluded that Bing held a 10.7% share in August. Bing was the fastest-growing search engine on Nielsen’s top-10 list.

Nielsen, though, also had Google showing growth, increasing its share by 2.6%, to 64.6%.

“This seems like a milestone for Bing,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research. “Ten percent is a big number for a new entrant. They’ve become ‘the other’ search engine.”

Microsoft definitely is looking to become “the other” search engine, busily beefing up Bing in hopes that it will eventually give Google a run for its money.

Last week, Microsoft released a beta version of a tool called Visual Search, which is designed to let Bing users search through galleries of images instead of mainly text.

In another shot at Google, Microsoft signed an agreement this summer calling for Yahoo to use Bing as the primary search engine on its site. The proposed alliance — which still must pass antitrust muster – could give the two companies some much-needed leverage in their ongoing battle against Google.

“Bing has made some good progress against Google, although I’m sure that both Microsoft and Yahoo, along with some of the market watchers, were expecting greater progress,” said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc. “However, we can’t underestimate just how entrenched Google is in the search and advertising market. Displacing them will be a long-term effort. In fact, even getting parity with Google will require a sustained effort in terms of innovation and investment.”

While Olds said 10% market share isn’t a magic number for Bing, it does show that Microsoft is making progress.

“I think it will be another couple of quarters before we can tell if Bing will be a serious competitor for Google search,” he added. “Google is definitely taking the Bing threat seriously, despite its still-overwhelming market position. Google understands just how important this battle is. More importantly, they know that Microsoft and Yahoo are determined this time to grab a big slice of the market. The resources that Microsoft and Yahoo can devote to the battle, along with their determination, make them a serious threat to Google. And Google knows it.”

Popularity: 1% [?]