I have to admit I’m surprised – and amused – and a little frightened – (and maybe just a tiny little bit turned on) by news that Microsoft’s Bing search engine reached a 9.9% market share in October 2009 compared to Google’s 65.4%. That’s a huge slice of the search pie for a product that had only been around five months.

Additionally, ads on Bing’s searches are 75% more likely to be clicked than Google’s. I think I have an explanation for both. When was the last time you saw an ad on TV for Google? In fact, when have you ever seen an ad on TV for Google the search engine; rather than some side-project like Chrome, Chrome OS, Android or something like that?

Bing’s success is probably coming from their ad campaign – and by definition, if you draw people in with an ad campaign, you’re going to get more people who are influenced by advertising. (There are also those who need to use IE for Web applications, where Bing is the default search – and simply never change it.)

Anyway, whatever the cause, Search is a viable competitive playing field again. To be fair, Google has repeatedly kept improving their search algorithms, but nothing inspires improvement like real-world competition.

It may also be interesting from another perspective, in that, while searches don’t take up a whole bunch of bandwidth themselves, all the little add-ons and perks that search engines tack-on – from Yahoo’s Flickr to Google’s YouTube to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D, can clog up the Inter-Tubes pretty quickly.