In their blog last Friday StatCounter announced that Bing had surpassed Yahoo on the previous day to become the second-most popular search site.

StatCounter counts around four billion page-loads per month and, based on this data, is able to generate a reasonably accurate view of the search habits of the webocracy.

At the time of the StatCounter blog, Bing had achieved second place over Yahoo in statistics for both USA (16.28% vs. 10.22%) and worldwide (5.62% vs. 5.13%).

“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," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated."

It only lasted a single day.  Perhaps Cullen was prescient. 

Data for Friday clearly showed that the honeymoon lasted just a single day.  The weekend didn’t help.

StatCounter provides a variety of tools allowing analysis of surfing habits.  This includes preferred browser, search engine and operating system (amongst other parameters).