Chances are that you've already heard of and even visited Bing, Microsoft's new search offering launched earlier in June, replacing the Live search of yesterday. It's new, shiny, and has pretty pictures, but does it really have much effect on the market?

There have been those headlines claiming it's "taken a bite out of Google," but, looking at the statistics, it hasn't really affected the search industry at all.

It's been going around the web that Bing has won a glorious one percent of Google's market share-- that's what the headlines say, anyway. Taking a closer look, though, we see it's not really that exciting and that it's probably too early to tell one way or the other, anyway.

Though Bing did gain market share in the past month, and Google's market share did decrease, headline-happy journalists are blowing things a bit out of proportion. \"Bite\" is hardly the word to use, and "nibble" is also probably incorrect as well. According to StatCounter, since the introduction of Bing, Microsoft's share in US searches grew by .42 percent (sorry, rest-of-the-world-- you're again being represented by one country's statistics). According to the same statistics, Google's share dropped by only .24 percent during the same time span.

That's hardly detrimental to Google, and is actually normal and most likely has little to do with Bing. Like stocks, companies' shares in just about everything often go up and down in increments from period to period without any alarm, especially companies with as many customers as Google has. Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, Google's shares in March dropped to 76.49 percent and then climbed back up to 79.08 percent in April-- a bigger difference than this past month.

All in all, the difference in percentages means very little in such a short amount of time. I'm no analyst except for my own personal speculations, but I think it's safe to say that Bing should get six months of being out in the wild before we begin to say it's cannibalizing other search engines.