This week Nielsen ratings indicated that Microsoft's Bing had reached a 10.7% reach in US search, making it the fastest growing US search engine. Google is still the giant with over 64.5% of all US search traffic. On a global scale, Bing grew by 44%, but when you consider that they held such a small fraction of global search, their world reach is still insignificant.

With Bing's recent announcement of Visual Search and the upcoming launch of Bing 2.0, what is in store for the Microsoft search engine? Can they actually challenge Google or has the search giant become so engrained in user’s daily lives that dethroning them can only come if they (Google) make catastrophic mistakes?

Total search in the US was up last month and Google still gained, just not at the rate that Bing did. But where in all this does Yahoo fit in, since it is likely that Bing and Yahoo will be joined at the hip at this time next year? Yahoo actually slid backwards by over 4%, continuing a dangerous trend. At this point Yahoo might not be able to survive without the help and financial backing from a company like Microsoft. It is up to the powers that be in Washington DC on whether or not Microsoft and Yahoo will actually be allowed to come together. I think it is a reasonable statement to say that without the coming together of these two search engines, they don’t stand a chance on their own to become a viable threat to Google.

Ask yourself this, does the growth from Bing have a ceiling or can they continue to close in on Google? Is the growth from Bing because of their giant 100 million dollar plus marketing campaign, coupled with user's natural curiosity? In my opinion Bing had no were to go but up. I too joined millions in trying out Bing and either by habit or sub–conscience migrated back to Google. I for one am excited to see things unfold in this reemerged search engine war. In the midst of fierce competition the user wins, as we will get the benefits of search technology developing at warp speed as the search giants continue to one–up one another. Lets hope for user's sake, this is a long battle.