Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, has surprised many by grabbing 11.1% of all US searches in its first week online, according to comScore, the US online marketing research giant.

Even the TechSmart website has recorded a decent number of referrals from the MSN replacement in the last week, with more than 2000 indexed pages on the engine. This is primarily due to Bing’s local search filtering, something that was completely lacking on MSN search.

Naturally much of this traffic is accounted for by the large amount of press the search engine has received, which like Cuil could prove short lived. Importantly, however, Bing seems to be highly functional; delivering relevant results and offering some very interesting page preview features.

It will be interesting to see if Bing is able to retain or capture more of the search market in the months to come, possibly capturing some of Google’s share and thus providing something resembling competition.