The efforts by Microsoft to promote and revamp Bing appear to be paying off, as the search engine has seen steady gains in the U.S. market since its launch in June 2009. Microsoft’s gains in search are due in part to its steady efforts to publicize and upgrade Bing. The company has just announced another bundle of enhancements to the search engine.

Most notable is an upgrade to the Quick Tabs feature, which delivers results based on what the search engine believes is the intent of the user’s query. The information delivered through Quick Tabs will now be displayed much more prominently.

“Over the next few months we are going to test some new design concepts moving Quick Tabs functionality to the top of the page for 1-click access to our most robust, visual, and organized pages,” wrote group product manager Todd Schwartz, in a blog post.

Improvements in Bing’s ability to deliver real-time information are also in the works by Microsoft. For example, a new feature will connect users who search for a specific news source, such as TechCrunch, not only to the main site but also to links to the most popular stories, based on what’s being shared across social networks like Facebook and Twitter at any given time.

Microsoft has also revealed an application that integrates data from the location-based social networking service, Foursquare.

Figures indicate that Microsoft’s share of U.S. search traffic has increased 37% since Bing went live last year. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share has declined 14% and Google has remained flat at the 65% mark.

Comparisons show incremental shifts in the market from month to month, while the longer-term view suggests that Microsoft is gaining considerable search share while Google sits idle and Yahoo fades out.