Satya Nadella, Microsoft Senior Vice President of Research and Development, pointed out to journalist at the Bing Summit in San Fransico, that Bing is slowly & steadily climbing its way up the market share chain. As per the latest report released by ComScore, Bing searches have grown to 11.8% (out of which 72% growth was recorded for heavy to medium users), while Google searches are slightly down (66.2%). He also noted that Bing is up more than 31% from their November figures last year.

Nadella specifically highlighted the vertical growth of the search engine and said that the company saw extraordinary growth for specialized searches in music, travel and shopping sectors. He cited music specifically as experiencing 8x growth.

The good news doesn't stop there. Bing has seen a whooping 224% growth in mobile applications and 5.5 million iPhone app downloads, making it one of the most popular iOS apps of 2010. When combined with Yahoo!, Bing now holds a 28% share of the U.S. search market.

While these figures may sound impressive, they still don't even come close to Google. Even if you combine Bing and Yahoo's market share it is still less than half of Google's. So, Bing " you still have a lot of work to do to reign in Google (if that's ever possible) and Google " sit back and relax, you've got nothing to worry about (at the moment).