Launched in May, Bing initially received ; some critics essentially called it Live Search with a new coat of paint. But Microsoft is nothing if tenacious. (Old-timers will recall how badly the early versions of Windows stank before Redmond finally found success with version 3.0.) The company has been steadily upgrading Bing since May, including some .

One new and noteworthy upgrade is the inclusion of search results from , an oddball, "computational knowledge" search tool that's probably too geeky for the average user. When integrated with a mainstream query engine, however, Wolfram Alpha algorithms prove their mettle by returning actionable data rather than just a page of links. Microsoft provides a few examples on its . Search for "bmi," for instance, and Bing displays Wolfram Alpha's body mass index calculator at the top of the results page.

It's debatable whether Bing is gaining market share, however, or simply spinning its wheels. According to online data service Experian Hitwise, rose to 9.57 percent in October 2009, up from 8.96 percent in September. Of course, Bing was still a distant third behind Google (70.6 percent) and Yahoo (16.14 percent).

Flash back to May, and Microsoft Live Search had 9.9 percent of the U.S. search market, according to Nielsen Online. Not a lot of improvement there, despite Microsoft's extensive and expensive Bing marketing blitz.

If you're a diehard Google Search fan, don't hate Bing. Embrace it. Because Microsoft's nipping at Google's heels will only make the world's dominant search engine that much better. In fact, it appears that Google is already playing catch-up. Last month it launched a new tool called , a feature that's very much like one first seen in Bing and Live Search. (To be fair, Similar Images was first launched in test mode in Google Labs in April.)