Bing managed to steal 0.2% of Google’s search market share in December

Looks like all of Microsoft’s Bing marketing stunts are starting to have an effect. Sort of. The search engine everyone loves to laugh at managed to steal a little ground from Google in the search market during December.

According to recent research from Comscore, Google still leads the market it helped redefine with 66.7% market share Bing managed to get 16.3% of the US search engine market.

Yahoo! meanwhile accounted for 12.2% (up 0.1 percentage points) of the market, with the rest being made up of smaller services.

As The Next Web points out though, raw market share isn’t everything.

Even as Google shed market share, it still managed to grow by five percent month on month.

According to Comscore, more than 17.6-billion explicit core searches were conducted in December (up four percent), with Google Sites ranking first with 11.8-billion (up four percent). Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.9-billion searches (up five percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.2-billion (up five percent), Ask Network with 534-million (up five percent) and AOL, Inc. with 310-million (up four percent).

It’s interesting that both Bing and Yahoo! grew in the period. The former may well be the result of a bump in Windows 8 devices, especially in the mobile and tablets sector. The latter’s growth meanwhile may well be the beginnings of the Marissa Mayer effect, especially as it rolls out a number of redesigns.