ComScore: Bing market share continues to creep upward

The comScore December market share numbers for U.S. search share are out, and Bing is continuing its slow, upward spiral.

Bing's share is now at 10.7 percent, up from 10.3 percent in November, comScore said. Yahoo is down -- to 17.3 percent in December, from 17.5 percent in November. And Google is holding its own, at 65.7 percent in December, compared to 65.6 in November.

Microsoft is continuing its push to use whatever means necessary to grow its search share. In January, company officials announced a deal with Microsoft via which HP will be making Bing the default search engine on most of its PCs. Microsoft struck a similar default-engine deal with Verizon recently, as well, also for an unspecified amount.

In search-related news this week, Microsoft officials said the company won't be pulling out of China, unlike rival Google, which is threatening to do so because of cyberattacks. (Those attacks have been linked to  a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, but didn't affect Microsoft, officials said earlier this week.)

There's still been no regulatory clearance on the Microsoft-Yahoo plan via which Microsoft will end up providing search results for many of Yahoo's Web properties. If and when that clearance happens, Microsoft's share will see a more significant upward bump, but with Bing's current gains coming as a result of Yahoo's losses, maybe less of a bump than Microsoft originally hoped.