Compete.com, one of a number of sites reporting search market share, has released figures for June showing a substantial increase in search share in June for Live Search:

According to a blog on the site, much of this increase is due to the increasing popularity of Live Search Club, a set of games (Chicktionary, anyone?) that use Live Search to help answer questions and win prizes.  One commenter on the Compete blog professes to know people who have won 10-20 copies of Windows Vista Ultimate, so somebody's playing, and playing a lot.

Of course there are lots of questions surrounding these latest numbers, and it's almost a requirement to take the numbers from Compete, comScore, Alexa, and Hitwise, analyze them all, and still draw your own conclusions about what the numbers mean.

If Search Club is drawing all this attention, then what does that mean for everyday users of search?  For one thing, since Live Search hasn't proven to be significantly better than Google or Yahoo, it must get people to try it somehow.  Is this just a marketing ploy?  Of course.  Will it work?  that remains to be seen, but these numbers from Compete seem to show that it just might, at least in the short term.  And once people give Live Search a go, and find it as good or better than Google?  Who knows.