Google's stock price has been on a steady rise over the last three months — thanks to that growth, the search, advertising, and mobile giant surpassed Microsoft earlier this morning as the second-most valuable technology company, according to Bloomberg. It's been a few hours since Google first surpassed Microsoft, and as of this writing both companies have market caps right around $248 billion. But given the huge rise in Google's stock over the last three months while Microsoft's has been essentially flat, Google should move past Microsoft into sole possession of second place before long (though we can't make any guarantees where the stock market is concerned).

Over the past few years, Google and Microsoft have been increasingly competitive on a number of fronts — Microsoft launched its own search engine in Bing, while Google broke into the mobile work in a big way with Android and launched its own browser (and browser-based desktop operating system) with Chrome. Microsoft has been increasingly blunt about touting its perceived advantages over Google, particularly following backlash towards Google's new privacy policy earlier in the year. But from a purely financial perspective, Google has been on a dominating role. That said, Google still has a long way to go to match Apple, whose market cap surpassed $500 billion earlier in the year and now sits at over $624 billion — nearly 40 percent higher than Google and Microsoft.

Update: The market has closed for the day, and it's now official — Google's market cap is $249.1 billion, comfortably ahead of Microsoft's $247.2 billion. It's still close enough that things could flip-flop tomorrow, but for now Google has surpassed Microsoft in market valuation.