While Google still remains king of search in the U.S., Bing continues to gain ground on Google according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise for the month of August 2011.

For the month of July, Google commanded 66.05% of the search market while Bing powered searches only accounted for 28.05% of all searches done in the U.S. (12.98% from bing.com and 15.07% from search.yahoo.com). Google’s search market share dropped nearly a whole percentage point to 65.09%, while Bing powered searches grew nearly a whole percentage point to 28.99% (13.10% from bing.com and 15.89% from search.yahoo.com).

So Bing’s growth is still continuing and it would seem as there are no signs that this growth will stop in the near future. While Bing does continue to slowly nibble away at Google’s market share, it would take about 18 months – assuming their growth remains constant – for Bing to be tied with Google’s market share. Will that happen? I guess we will have to wait and see, won’t we?

Yahoo’s troubles have yet to end, especially with the recent firing of CEO (well, now ex-CEO) Carol Bartz – over the phone.

Carol Bartz wasn’t very happy, in part due to the fact that Roy Bostick (chairman of the board) read from a script. After he finished reading, Bartz asked, "Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself?"

Reasons for firing Carol Bartz include such things as, well, Yahoo’s financials haven’t been getting any better. While they certainly have cut costs thanks to the Microsoft search deal, Yahoo is still struggling to keep up and figure out what they want to do when they are "all grown up."

The board of directors probably feel like idiots now – or as Bartz said, doofuses – after they rejected Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid a couple years back. As of this writing Yahoo’s market cap is around $17.5 billion.

It also appears that the board of directors may now be open to a sale, but they aren’t likely to get any bids from Microsoft. For the most part, Microsoft’s bid was to gain more traction in the search and advertising market. While the entire purchase of the company fell through, their search pact still got them what they wanted: to power Yahoo’s search engine.

As the saying goes, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free – or at least at a significantly reduced price and risk.

Yahoo! Search has gained 0.2 percentage points (from 15.9% to 16.1%) search market share for the month of July 2011, but Google dropped 0.4 percentage points (from 65.5% down to 65.1%) during the same time period according to the latest data from comScore. However Bing remained stagnant at 14.4%.

This means that Bing now commands 30.5% of the search market, compared to Google’s 65.1%.

If you are wondering where the rest of of 0.2 percentage points went, 0.1 went to AOL – but the remaining 0.1 must have been lost to a rounding error.

While Google may have lost some market share – again – they didn’t lose in overall search volume. In this case Google gained 2% in overall search volume (going from 10.948 billion to 11.158 billion), along with Yahoo! gaining 4% (2.65 billion to 2.764 billion) and Bing gaining 3% in search volume (2.405 billion to 2.473 billion).

It’s that time of the month again, and comScore has revealed their search engine market share data, showing that once again, Bing-powered search grew and Google dropped. Hitwise has yet to release their latest search market share data as of yet.

For the month of March 2011, comScore reports that Google had a market share of 65.7%, Yahoo! with 15.7%, Bing with 13.9%. That meant together Bing powered searches accounted for 29.6% of the search market. comScore’s data indicated that for March 2011 Yahoo! searches dropped by 0.4 percentage points, with Bing gaining 0.3, causing a net loss of 0.1 percentage points for the two combined.

This month both explicit searches on Yahoo! and Bing grew, with Yahoo! at 15.9% (up by 0.2 percentage points) and Bing at 14.1% (up by 0.2 percentage points), giving the duo a combined market share of 30%.

Google, on the other hand, dropped by 0.3 percentage points down to 65.4%. Ask.com’s market share fell by 0.1 percentage points (to 3%), as did Aol’s (1.5%).

It appears as though Bing is continuing to gain on Google in the U.S. market, but it is unlikely Microsoft is making much headway in other parts of the world.

As soon as Hitwise reports their monthly market share results, I will be sure to post them as Hitwise includes a success rate (percentage of searches which require no refinement to find what users were looking for), which comScore does not.

Last month Hitwise reported that Bing’s US market share rose 6% in January 2011, compared to December of 2010, at the expense of Google, and that trend has not stopped yet. It certainly appears that Google’s attempt to slander Bing did not turn out well, but of course we will never know if: 1) people who made the switch knew about this, 2) people remember, or 3) believed what Google even said.

Now, according to Experian Hitwise, Bing powers 28.48% of US searches, that is up 4% from last month’s 27.44%. The Bing search site itself (www.bing.com) grew by 5%, going from 12.81% to 13.49%, which is not bad at all. Searches on the Yahoo! Search site also increased as well, at a slightly slower rate of 3%, going from 14.62% to 14.99%.

With all this growth, it has to come at the expense of someone, and that someone is Google. Google’s market share went from 67.95% down to 66.69%, a decrease of 2%. Let us keep in mind how much Google has been losing traction, because in December of 2010, Google’s market share stood at a 69.67%, meaning they have fallen by one percentage point every month for the past three months.

Bing’s market share will undoubtedly continue to rise — well, that is if Microsoft ever takes Windows Phone 7 seriously — as WinRumors has pointed out, because Nokia smart phones thus forward will be powered by Windows Phone, which has Bing integration, and other Nokia devices will use Bing as well.

Though this is continued bad news for Google market share wise, it is unlikely that it will affect their bottom line. That is because while search market share is down, it doesn’t necessarily mean the actual amount of queries made on Google have decreased, it just means that Bing’s has increased the amount of queries at a faster pace than Google.