Stefan Mileschin

Software giant Microsoft's Bing is now the number two search engine behind Google in the Western world.

ComScore is reporting how Bing and Microsoft's other websites fielded 2.75 billion search requests in the US during December.

This equals a 15.1 percent share of the US search traffic, while Yahoo processed 2.65 billion search requests, representing 14.5 percent of the US market.

Google is still the US's number one search engine, with 12 billion requests in December and holding a 65.9 percent market share.

Given that Bing actually carries out Yahoo's searches these days means that Microsoft seems to have a big slice of the search market out there.

Microsoft and Yahoo signed a decade long agreement in 2009 where Yahoo saved money by relying on Microsoft to provide the bulk of its search technology.

Vole wanted the deal so it could have more search requests to analyse each year, giving it a better chance to learn about people's tendencies and preferences.

But Bing has been costing Microsoft an arm and a leg. Since 2008 it has lost Vole nearly $7 billion.

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