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.

Microsoft has previewed its new search engine called Bing, formerly known as Kumo and is set to launch it on Wednesday June 3.

Microsoft calls Bing a “Decision Engine” that initially will focus on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business.

Microsoft says it developed Bing as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the “information overload” that has come to characterize many of today’s search experiences.

A comScore study focused on search engines found that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The study also found that about two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.

“When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

Google continued to dominate, capturing 72.39 percent of all U.S. searches for the month.

Yahoo trailed with 16.36 percent of the search market share, falling 19 percent year-over-year.

MSN Search also saw its search share dip 17 percent year-over-year to grab 5.50 percent of the market.

Ask.com received 4.07 percent of the search market and dropped just one percent year-over-year.

Google was the only major search engine to see its search share increase, rising 8 percent year-over-year.

The length of search queries has increased over the past year, according to Hitwise. Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length have increased 8 percent between March 2009 and March 2008.

Searches of eight or more words increased 20 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries – those averaging one to four words long – have decreased 2 percent. Searches of two words accounted for the majority of searches, amounting to 23.17 percent of all queries.

Search engines continue to be the most popular way Internet users navigate to key industry categories.  Comparing March 2009 with March 2008, business and finance, sports, online video and social networking categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.