But none of that matters if Bing doesn’t grow and find a way to compete with Google . So after a month, where are we? We knew that Bing was growing, but the numbers being released tonight tell a tale of success, as Bing is now the 13th most visited site on the web.

According to Compete.com, Bing was able to amass 49.57 million unique visitors in its first month as Microsoft’s official search engine. Bing’s traffic trumps that of Digg (38.96 million) Twitter (23 million), and CNN (28.54 million). We want to stress that this focuses on U.S. visitors, since Compete does not track international visits.

The problem is that all of those stats are quite misleading without attributing the fact that Microsoft’s previous search engine, Live.com, redirects directly to Bing.com.  If you look at the stats for Live.com, you’ll notice that prior to Bing.com it hit an apogee of around 100 million visitors per month.  In fact, I’d say that since traffic for Bing is “only” at around half of what Live.com was the month prior to its debut, its probably far too early to tell how popular it actually is.

Furthermore, when you take into consideration that MSN.com directly feeds into Bing (previously Live) at the top of its page (primo real estate if there ever was any), and that MSN.com is the default home page for millions of Internet Explorer home pages, its further reason to take it all with a grain of salt.

I think the jury’s out on how popular Bing is — and with all due respect to Ben Parr,  that jury’s only due in several months I’d say.