Insert Alliterative Bing Headline Here

Early gains do not guarantee a long-term increase in search market share, and thanks to its experience with Live Search and Live Search Cashback, Microsoft (MSFT) knows this better than anyone. That said, Redmond’s new search engine, Bing, does seem to be making some solid progress.

For example, a comScore (SCOR) report said earlier this week that Microsoft’s share of the search market has risen to 11.1 percent from 9.1 percent since Bing’s debut.

And now market researcher Hitwise reports that Bing is among the top 20 most popular Web sites in the U.S. and among the top 10 in Canada (click on chart below).

“In the U.S., Bing ranked 17th among all Web sites out of over 450,000 Web sites, up from 5120 the week before the official launch when the Web site was merely a placeholder,” Heather Dougherty, Director of Research at Hitwise, wrote in a blog post. “Within the Search Engines category, Bing ranked 4th out of the search engines tracked by Hitwise…In Canada, Bing hit the top 10 among all Web sites during the first week of launch and captured 1% of all Canadian Internet visits last week. Bing also ranked 3rd last week in terms of the market share of visits within the Search Engines category behind Google Canada and Google.”

Not bad. Of course, early successes like these are driven as much by marketing as by technological prowess and positive user experience. And right now, Bing’s got some major marketing dollars behind it. But those will only last for so long.

And as Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt likes to point out, you really can’t expect to buy your way into the search market. “You don’t just buy it with ads,” Schmidt told Fox Business earlier this week. “You earn it, and you earn it customer by customer, search by search, answer by answer.”