Yahoo! News reports that market watcher comScore (News - Alert) Inc.’s latest statistics puts Microsoft Bing in the second place behind search engine giant Google in the lucrative search business. According to this report, the software giant Microsoft (News - Alert) has finally reached a long-sought and expensive goal.

Per comScore’s study, Bing and Microsoft's other websites fielded 2.75 billion search requests in the U.S. during December, catapulting in front of Yahoo Inc. for the first time in the race for runner up to Google. The report reveals that Bing's December volume translated into a 15.1 percent share of the U.S. search traffic, while Yahoo processed 2.65 billion search requests, representing 14.5 percent of the U.S. market.

Meanwhile, Google continues to maintain the lead position. With 12 billion U.S. requests in December, Google remained Internet's go-to place for information, according to comScore. That translates into a 65.9 percent of the market share, says comScore study.

However, media analysts have expected Microsoft and Yahoo to flip-flop their positions in Internet search since they announced a partnership in July 2009. “This 10-year agreement has enabled Yahoo to save money by relying on Microsoft to provide the bulk of its search technology,” wrote Associated Press (News - Alert) reporter Michael Liedtke.

With this deal, Yahoo depends a lot on Microsoft's technology for searches. But, it still continues to offer some unique features within its results to attract more people to search on its website instead of going to Bing, wrote Liedtke. Consequently, Yahoo still gets 88 percent of the ad revenue from searches conducted on its website and receives nothing from queries entered on Bing, reports Yahoo! News.

To turn around the company, Yahoo recently hired a new CEO Scott Thompson, who comes from eBay, where he was the president of the PayPal (News - Alert) unit.

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