The competition among search engine vendors is measured in single digit gains, but after a while, those gains add up, and they have value. Traffic translates to ad rates, and ad rates are everything for these sites. Nielsen Company found in February that Bing continued to gnaw away at the share held by Yahoo and Google. They must be doing something right, because all the kitschy ads in the world will only get you so far. Datamation has a look.

In February's search sweepstakes, Microsoft's Bing engine picked up just over 1.5 percentage points of market share, while Google lost just over a point, and Yahoo held almost even with a loss of less than half a percentage point, according to a leading Web analytics firm.

Overall, U.S. searches declined by more than 1 billion in February, slipping to 9.18 billion from 10.27 billion in January, the Nielsen Company said in a blog post.

In the February rankings, Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing saw its market share increase from 10.9 percent of all U.S. searches in January to 12.5 percent last month. That amounts to 1.14 billion searches using Bing in February, up from 1.18 billion in January.

Microsoft broke the 10 percent market share barrier in November, and has continued climbing slowly but steadily since the launch of Bing in early June.

Read the full story at Datamation:
Bing Gains While Google Slips in February: Nielsen