Microsoft's Mehdi with his daughter's list.

Sure, Microsoft's Bing search engine has gained a few percentage points in market share over the past year, and Google for some reason seems to be weirdly mimicking its features, but if Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi ever starts feeling overconfident, he can refer to some market research from his daughter to keep him in check.

Speaking yesterday morning at the SMX Advanced search conference in Seattle, the Microsoft online exec explained that his daughter went to school shortly after the Bing launch one year ago and, unprompted by him, polled her classmates on their search engine usage. Pulling the list out of his pocket, it wasn't even close.

"This is a list of people who use Bing, and then the other engine," Mehdi explained. "There's four names (on the Bing side). There's one boy, I know he's got a crush on my daughter, that's why he's on this list. Then there's a long list over here (on the Google side), the top two of which are her best friends."

When his daughter got home, he said, "She comes to me, and she goes, 'Daddy, we have a lot of work to do.' "

Microsoft currently stands at No. 3 in the U.S., with just under 12 percent market share, compared to 65 percent for Google, although it will get close to 30 percent when it adds Yahoo's share under their partnership. There are advantages to being No. 2 or No. 3, including the ability to be somewhat risky, Mehdi said.

"We've done a lot of experimentation in the product, the user experience. One of the things we've done is we've bet very big on the left rail. You all know that's super-valuable real estate. Some things have worked really well, but one or two things are not working that well. We're going to do some more revs, and you'll see some more stuff in an upcoming set of releases where we're going to try again to take a big, big gamble -- which only we can do, take those gambles, because I think we're a firm No. 2."

At the same time, he added, "We've done some distribution deals to try and get our product out in front of customers, and some haven't worked out so well, the return hasn't been worth the investment in money."

At the end of the session, the conference organizers presented Mehdi with a cake to mark the first anniversary of Bing. He accepted it on behalf of the team, but echoed his daughter's sentiment. "I don’t think we deserve cake and candles," he said, "we’ve got a lot of work to do."

Previously: Bing loves Apple back: Details of Microsoft's iPhone 'partnership'