According to recent statistics from Microsoft, the June 2009 launch of its Bing search engine has brought about an 8 percent growth in unique visitors during the month, along with a nearly twofold rise in the number of people "likely to recommend" the Bing site.

So far as the shopping front is concerned, Microsoft reports say that site visits to Bing Shopping have increased three times since its launch, and transactions to Bing cashback have risen 5.42 percent. Meanwhile, Bing Travel has seen a whopping 90 percent increase in its traffic.

Microsoft, which has essentially re-launched its search engine business with Bing's launch in early June, has confirmed that the data showing growth pertains to June 2009 vis-à-vis the May 2009 figures, prior to Bing's launch.

In addition, Microsoft has also clarified that the mentioned figures are based on its own polling. Nonetheless, there it is still quite evident that Bing has spelled initial gains for Microsoft!

Commenting on the figures, Yusuf Mehdi - Microsoft's Senior VP of the online audience business group - said in a blog post: "This is an important metric to us because we think it speaks to Bing's ability to meet your needs, be they for general purpose searching or for searches to help you make smarter decisions in one or more of our four focus areas of shopping, travel, health and local."