By Jimmy Rogers (@me)
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

We’ve been reporting quite a bit on Bing and it’s recent ad campaign.  Why?  Well first of all, a web-based product from Microsoft that isn’t simply trying to copy everything already out there (See Live.com) is somewhat notable.  Second, Bing seems to be part of the new trend: semantic search.  Now whether Bing is really semantic like Wolfram|Alpha claims to be, we don’t know, but one thing we do know is that people are at least giving it a shot.

Today the StatCounter Blog announced that according to their Global Stats information (which pools all of the traffic data from their collective metrics customers), Bing has actually overtaken Yahoo! Search as the second top search engine in the US.  [Note: The image below is a bar graph of yesterday’s stats…for last week’s graph, click the Global Stats link above]

Even though Google is still about 70% of the market, Bing’s leap forward is historic.  The flagging Yahoo!, if you remember, used to be neck and neck with Google for search supremacy.  News like this seems to bring it closer and closer to its eventual death.

The question now is whether Bing will continue to rise and become a new competitor for Google’s traffic, or if its novelty will soon wear off like so many other new search engines.  Another factor in this analysis is the type of search engine that Bing is trying to be.  They claim to be focused on the “give me an answer” user as opposed to someone doing a more in depth search.  Maybe they will settle comfortably into a niche.  Only time will tell!

Have you used Bing yet?  What do you think?