In a press release issued today, web statistics firm StatCounter showed an increase in US search market share from 8.23% in June to 9.41% in July.  Google was down in the US from 78.48% in June to 77.54% in July.  Global figures show Google still dominating, with 89.23% share in July (down from 89.80% in June).

It must be noted that Bing tracking is an inexact science, and each of the major web tracking services has their own methodologies, all somewhat different.  The numbers from StatCounter come from websites that have installed the StatCounter “invisible web tracker”, so while the sample size is big, it may be skewed towards the type of people more likely to install the tracker, whoever they may be.  According to the site:

Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication.

Still, Bing seems to be gaining some momentum, which couldn’t have been hurt by the Yahoo! announcement, even though that won’t take place for a year or more.  We’ll be interested to see what the other major web stats trackers say about Bing.