According to data from Internet statistics firm StatCounter, Bing is now the second largest search engine in the US in terms of search share. The two competitors are virtually tied worldwide however.

In the US, Google maintains a commanding lead with 71.99 percent of the market as of June 4. However, this is down over six points from the day before. During the same period, Bing rose from 8.4 to 15.64 percent. Yahoo only dropped slightly, from 11.28 to 10.32 percent.

Google seems to be the primary victim of Bing’s success. “It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner,” StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said.

Worldwide, Google controls 87.66 percent, followed by Bing at 5.56 percent and Yahoo at 5.17 percent. Obviously Bing has a ways to go outside of the US to present any meaningful challenge to Google’s dominance.

Obviously, it remains to be seen whether Bing can hold on to its gains. A jump like this is not all that unusual: a lot of web users are likely giving Microsoft’s new search engine a shot, and it may have artificially gained from the IE6 bug which defaulted search to Bing (StatCounter estimates share at around 23 percent).

It will be interesting to watch over the next few weeks.