When you’re trudging up a mountain with not even a glimpse of the summit, and all you know is that you’re really, really far behind the guy in the lead, it might be nice to know that hey, at least you’re in second. Bing can claim that status now in the search engine world, as it has surpassed Yahoo to sit a distant second to Google.

Microsoft has been working hard to get Bing past Yahoo, and according to the Washington Post, those efforts have paid off with 2.75 billion search requests in the U.S. in December. Those numbers finally gave them crowing rights over Yahoo for the first time, and means that some people actually don’t Google things.

Bing’s December hits equal about a 15.1 percent of the U.S. search traffic, says comScore. Yahoo’s 2.65 billion search requests translate to 14.5 percent.

So where is the almighty Google at? They’ve got 12 billion U.S. requests in that same month, or about 65.9 percent of the market share. And the better your comScore number, the more likely companies are going to want to put their ads with your results and the more money you make.

This position switch-up isn’t that surprising to analysts, however, as they’ve seen it coming since Microsoft and Yahoo partnered up in July 2009. Their agreement allows Yahoo to sit back and relax and save money while Microsoft does most of the search technology work.

When Bing gets to be a verb that means “to search the Internet,” that’s when they’ll know they’ve really made it. Until then, mountain climbing!

Search flip flop: Microsoft’s Bing edges past Yahoo into 2nd place behind Google in US market [Washington Post]

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