Bing Reports 8 Percent Visitor Growth Its First Month After Launch

Microsoft is definitely relishing its Bing moment, communicating gains in market share every chance it gets to build a story of steady progression against both Google and Yahoo. Today, Microsoft self-reported an 8 percent increase in unique visitors to its search engine in June, the first full month after it debuted its Bing search engine (comparisons are to its previous effort, Microsoft Live Search). According to the Bing blog:

We saw 8 percent growth in unique users to Bing.com in June, which is an important indicator that you are trying Bing and the word is spreading. Based on our own polling, we have also seen the number of people “likely to recommend” Bing double in our debut month

An 8 percent increase in search traffic is significant, and paints the picture that some of the early gains reported by comScore and others managed to stick. Besides its main search page, Microsoft’s strategy of combining different search experiences under the Bing brand seems to be working for at least shopping and travel. Bing Shopping saw a “nearly a 3x increase in site visits and a 5.42% increase in transactions to Bing cashback” during the month of June, and Bing Travel (formerly Farecast) got a 90 percent boost to traffic versus May, 2009 simply by becoming the default travel tab for Bing.