From analyzing the data from Chitika, it seems that Google is still the preferred search engine even though Bing & previously MSN Live is set as the default search engine for Internet Explorer. Even with the Microsoft & Yahoo! search alliance, Bing will only have a total of 22% of all searches from Internet Explorer in comparison to Google’s 74.2% Internet Explorer web search.

Chitika analyzed 163,211,927 searches – a sample of the Chitika network’s search data from July 30th through August 16th – based on operating systems.

During Bing’s initial launch, a lot of speculators and critics claimed that the spike in traffic was purely due to public interest & curiosity. Bing now appears to be a real competitor to the Google search monopoly. 16.7% of the Internet users from the U.S. now uses Bing for search. Bing’s share of search result pages in the U.S. also climbed to 12.1%. And according to StatCounter, Bing has once again surpassed Yahoo! as the number two search engine provider in the U.S. Furthermore, according to Compete.com, Bing had over 49.5 million unique visitors and a total of 220 million page visits in June.