Microsoft’s Bing grew 22% in August according to Nielsen, giving it a 10.7% share of searches within the US. This confirms the earlier reports from ComScore and others that Bing has managed to build upon its promising first month. This indicates that while the massive launch marketing campaign gave Bing a boost, enough users are finding the experience useful to keep the momentum going.

Against all the odds, it seems as though Microsoft has successfully reinvented its search business. What’s more, it’s done it just in time to take advantage of Carol Bartz taking over at Yahoo and opening the door to the recently announced 10-year revenue-sharing deal between the two industry giants. Yahoo’s search business has pretty much stalled over the last couple of months but Bing and Yahoo combined now provide nearly 27% of searches which is more than enough for PPC advertisers to take the time to build them into campaigns.

Remember too that wherever there are new users, new ad-management interfaces and new search functionality – see Bing Visual Search – there is inefficiency in the market until things shake out. And where there is market inefficiency, there is room for arbitrage and opportunity. [via mthink.com]