Bing has helped Microsoft to modestly increase its search market share by 1 percent in the U.S. according to an analysis for June conducted by measurement firm StatCounter.

Microsoft had 8.23 percent market share in June, behind Yahoo at 11.04 percent according to the analysis. Unsurprisingly Google still dominates the U.S. market but has fallen back slightly from 79.07 percent in April to 78.48 percent in June.

Microsoft U.S. market share has gone from 7.21 percent in April to 8.23 percent in June.

“At first sight, a 1% increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive,” said Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date.”

Looking at weekly trends for June, Microsoft (Bing, Live Search and MSN Search in total) had peaked post launch at 9.21 percent in week 1st – 7th June. But after falling away in the following two weeks it has made a comeback in the last week in June to 8.45 percent.

Microsoft market share, May/June – US
18th to 24th May: 7.41%
25th to 31st May: 9.11%
1st to 7th June: 9.21%
8th to 14th June: 7.47%
14th to 21st June: 7.6%
22nd to 28th June: 8.45%

Overall, Bing is a big improvement over Microsoft’s Live Search. The company has done a good job initially promoting Bing, but a $100 million in marketing tends to help such efforts.

Bing is unlikely to be a “Google killer” but it is showing it has the potential to compete in search at least initially. The long term results for Bing will be the real test, until then you can still expect to see Google remain the dominate search engine.