No, it’s not another revival of the British TV series The Prisoner.

According to a recent Nielsen report, Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, has just overtaken Yahoo! and now controls the second largest piece of the US search market share.

This turn of events was hardly unexpected.  This time last year Bing was the fastest growing search engine in the marketplace.  Shortly before that Yahoo, which used to be the market leader, agreed to merge it’s search functions with the Microsoft newcomer.

August was the first month of integration between the two services, which both maintain separate interfaces to the Microsoft algorithm.

As of last month, Bing controls 13.9% of the market share, while Yahoo only commands 13.1%.  The elephant in the room, of course, is Google, whose 65% market share is still virtually unchallenged.