by Claudia Bruemmer

Bing has been nibbling away at Google’s search dominance since last year, and it now owns 30 percent of the U.S. search market (14 percent Bing and 15 percent Yahoo!). As reported on Bing’s search blog, Bing Shopping now gives users more selection features, and helps them find products with fewer steps.

Because of its partnership with Yahoo!, and by improving its search algorithm with a thousand tweaks, Bing search has improved considerably and can’t be ignored by searchers or businesses any more. Bing Shopping has expanded the number of products available in its index over the past year by a factor of five, with listings from Nordstrom, ESPN, Tom’s Shoes, Sony Store, Babies R Us, Dick’s Sporting Goods and more. In addition, Bing Shopping now includes the following user-friendly features.

You Can Refine Your Searches Faster. To make searching faster and easier, Bing Shopping now includes filters on the left side of the page that can help narrow your search results by category, brand and price. While previously, you had to click to the results page before using filters, now, you can select as many or as few as you need from the get go. Let’s say you’re shopping for shoes. You’d start by entering “shoes” in the search box and would immediately get a list of the most common filters directly in the search box as shown below. At this point, you could click search and get results for “shoes,” or you could select one of the filter options.

Another new enhancement is a Facebook share feature that helps you share multiple shopping lists with friends on the social networking site.

Sharing Your Shopping Lists on Facebook. Bing made some improvements to its shopping list feature by removing the limitation to only one list. Now, you can create a list for your vacation, for instance, and another list for Christmas, birthdays and other occasions. Shoppers can also share any of their lists with Facebook friends. When they share a list on Facebook and their friends comment, they can see the comments directly on Bing. Pretty cool.

Other improvements include the addition of a Find Sale Prices feature, a Sort by Store feature and Related Items feature.

Find Sale Prices. Bing added product-level deals to the shopping site. When you search for products, you will see the discounted price ( if available) next to the listing. Bing also has a “price reduced” filter under the price.

Sort by Store. Bing Shopping added a filter on the product page that sorts products by popular stores.

Related Items. When shoppers view a product, Bing displays a “related items” feature showing accessories and similar products.

Improved Browsing. Bing Shopping revamped many of its browse pages, making it easier for shoppers to browse products.

You can find more information, including a video by the Bing team, on the Bing blog.