Since the release of the fourth version of Apple’s iOS operating system for the iPhone, Microsoft’s Bing can be used as the default search engine on the iPhone. So far, however, Bing has not been able to make major inroads on that device. According to a new study from advertising network Chitika, which recently launched its mobile ad platform, Google continues to dominate search on the iPhone. Almost 97% of searches on the iPhone originate from Google in Safari and the native Google app.
The Safari toolbar accounts for half of these Google searches, but a large contingent of iPhone users (42%) also surfs to Google.com to initiate searches on their phones or uses Google’s website to edit their previous searches. The native Google app itself accounts for more referral traffic (8.68%) to Chitika’s network than Bing and Yahoo combines, essentially making Google both the number one and number two search engine on the iPhone. Yahoo, which can also be set as the default search engine, generates about 2% of all iPhone searches.
While Chitika’s data puts Bing at a paltry 0.58%, the actual number is probably quite a bit higher. As Chitika’s research director Daniel Ruby told us, this data only represents Web traffic from Safari. The native Bing app for the iPhone does not send a referral URL, so it is almost impossible to fully understand its impact on Bing’s iPhone traffic. He estimates that the “real” number for Bing is somewhere between 1% and 4% (though we would guess that it’s at the lower end of this scale).
