Microsoft turns up heat on Google.

In the search engine area, Google has reined king for most of recently memory but new moves from Microsoft and its Bing search engine is heating up competition.

Microsoft's re-branding of Live Search to Bing was the first step in attempting to take share from Google. The old name was confusing and unattractive, but the simple rebranding gave it a boost in usage.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant saw US market shares jump to 8.23 percent in June from 7.21 percent in April, putting a small dent in Google's commanding share of 78.48 percent. Bing's global market share in search engine usage rose to 3.30% in June from 3.08% in April.

"Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they've found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions," Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive officer, said.

Despite the improvements, most still prefer Google and would still continue using it over Bing, according to Catalystnyc.com research. The group finds that in terms of organization, options and its features, users find Google more pleasing.

Microsoft's Bing feature offers Google-like search types including video, news, images and maps. But it has categorized search and automated search unlike Google; it has Bing Health, Bing Mobile and improves visual presentation, Bing Shopping local and Bing travel, and has access to search history and many more.

Google search also features important things such as weather forecast, stock quotes, time, sport scores, calculator, book search, unit conversion and currency conversion, dictionary, spell checker, Movie ShowTime, Find your house, flight status and information, Google code and etc.