After giving Google a good competition in the US, Microsoft's very own search engine Bing has now been launched for users across the United Kingdom. Till now, UK users have only been able to access the US version of the search engine, but now they have one specific to their own county. With the launch of a UK version, Microsoft aims at delivering more localized search results.

"This is a serious, long-term commitment from Microsoft to put a differentiated search product in to the market place", shared Ashley Highfield, Managing Director of Microsoft's Consumer and Online Divisions in the UK. "We have not just used the US version of Bing. We've had a UK team focusing on what will work particularly well over here". Bing was launched in the US in May this year.

Bing UK will offer all the features that the US version boasts of, including real-time Twitter updates, in addition to a tie-in with Wolfram Alpha, a "computational search engine" focused on providing searchers with specific answers instead of a long list of URLs. Current stats have reported that 80% of UK's search market is dominated by Google, in contrast to Microsoft's share of a mere 3%. With Bing UK, the company is looking to change the same.

Since the launch of Bing, Microsoft's share in the global search engine market has increased by 1.5%, which considering Google's long standing dominance is quite an achievement.