New research has indicated that 55 per cent web users could ditch Google in favour of Microsoft's new Bing search engine in the future.
Conducted by One News Page, the poll of more than 1,000 web users also revealed that 58 per cent thought Google might become too dominant at a later date.
Despite the positive response, users criticised Bing for being too similar to Google, although it was praised for being easy to use and having an attractive interface.
Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, founder of One News Page, noted that Microsoft has previously broken into saturated markets and come out on top, such as when its Internet Explorer browser overtook Netscape.
"My verdict is that Bing will give Google a good run for its money and the resultant renewed competition in the search engine market can only be a good thing for the internet," he remarked.
Google.co.uk accounted for 78.87 per cent of all web searches in the UK last month, according to Hitwise, with Google.com taking 12.4 per cent, Yahoo! seeing share of 2.83 per cent and Ask.com representing 1.65 per cent of queries.
By contrast, Microsoft's Live Search ranked fifth with a market share of 0.94 per cent.
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