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Microsoft’s new search engine continues to gain market traction, but it may not be for long. Bing, the service debuted just more than two weeks ago, continued to attract daily users for a second week.

Microsoft sites’ average daily penetration among U.S. searches reached 16.7 percent during the week of June 8-12, up three percentage points from May 25-29, the week before Bing’s debut, according to a study by comScore, an Internet traffic tracking company.

In its second week, Microsoft’s share of search-result pages in the U.S. increased 12.1 percent, also up three percentage points from the week before its launch.

How Long Will It Last?

One week after its May 28 debut, Bing’s market share rocketed past that of rival Yahoo, both in the U.S. and globally. Bing took second place behind Google, which has 71.47 percent of the U.S. market, and beat Yahoo’s 10.22 percent with 16.28 percent, according to StatCounter, a New York daily Internet tracking company.

Globally, Bing had 5.62 percent of the market while Yahoo had 5.13 percent. Google held first place globally with 87.62 percent.

Even with a successful launch, it wasn’t all smiles for Microsoft. Just after Bing launched, scandal ensued, giving the service some negative attention. A feature in Bing called smart motion preview, which plays videos when a user navigates over it, landed Microsoft in hot water with both child-advocacy groups and countries such as China. Microsoft defended the service and provided its customers with an extra layer of control over the content.

The question in many observers’ minds is how long Bing’s traction will last.

“It is just out of the gate, so it won’t be until the next few months that we will be able to tell whether they have taken some real percentage points,” said Aodhan Cullen, founder of StatCounter, from…

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