A recent StatCounter report reveals that Microsoft’s Bing has overtaken Yahoo for the very first time in February 2011. Figures reveal that Bing search engine closed with a 4.37 percent share, comparatively higher than Yahoo’s 3.93 percent, but still much less than Google’s massive search share of 89.94 percent in global search market. “It is significant that Bing overtook Yahoo globally for the first time,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen, “but it remains a tough battle to claw back Google’s search market share.”

This is not the only surprising news from StatCounter, as February also experienced a dip in Google’s search share, reaching below 90 percent for the very first time. Okay…but here’s the twist! The crucial point is that this analytics firm does not have reliable results reputation as back in 2009, it found that Bing had passed Yahoo in the U.S., then fell back to third place position. So, until other firms do not publish the news independently, we can’t get confirmed on this.

Yahoo is also facing a threat from Facebook in its display ads business as the largest share of US Display ads revenues goes to this social networking site. An eMarketer report suggests that Facebook’s has experienced a growth of 80.9 percent in display ad revenues that accounts for 21.6 percent of total revenue of this business in United States. On the contrary, Yahoo’s share remains 16.4 percent and Google at 12.6 percent. AOL also faces loss at 4.4 percent from 5.3 percent.

“Yahoo!’s US display ad revenues will increase by double digits each year from 2010 through 2012. Despite that, not only will Facebook’s display revenues surpass Yahoo!’s this year, Google’s revenues will exceed Yahoo!’s next year,” said David Hallerman, principal analyst at eMarketer. “What that leapfrogging trend confirms is the strong demand among brand marketers for online display ad placements.”

“Even as some observers expect Google’s search revenues to fall due to competition from Bing, the reported revenue reality shows that after a relatively ‘slow’ Q1 2010, net US ad revenues at Google grew by 27% or more each of the following three quarters,” noted Hallerman. “It will be hard for Bing to stop the Google juggernaut, and, in fact, Bing’s search gains are basically accompanied by Yahoo!’s search losses.”

This research is focused on top 4 search sites of US and finding out the percentage of total search ad spending in the country for 2009-2012. In an another report from the firm, it reported that the net ad revenues at top 5 sites increase by 20.5 percent, which sounds good. It also confirmed that though Facebook has become a major player in online display ads market, the overall winners remain as Google and Yahoo. It’s because the expected revenues of Google will be around $12.4 billion, while that of Yahoo will be $3.4 billion. Facebook’s share will increase substantially; $2.87 billion and is clearly less than Yahoo.

So, the overall growth of Facebook is really impressive and in fact tremendous, the overall share goes to Google at first and Yahoo at second position. But yes, we may also see Yahoo and AOL experiencing a steady decline in their shares in the same period.