During his WWDC keynote today, Steve Jobs announced that Microsoft’s Bing will now be one of the search options in Safari on the iPhone. Microsoft already developed a Bing iPhone application that allows iPhone users to use the search engine’s features on the iPhone without having to create a browser bookmark. Now, Bing will take its place next to Google – which will remain the default – and Yahoo Search.
Early rumors indicated that Bing would actually replace Google as the default search engine on the iPhone, but Kara Swisher quickly crushed these rumors two weeks ago and correctly predicted that Apple would just make Bing another search option on the iPhone.
While it remains to be seen how many users will actually switch their default search engine, this could potentially be a major win for Bing. Bing’s market share on the desktop continues to increase slowly but surely (though it saw some minor dips in its popularity recently), but even though Microsoft already offers a mobile version of Bing, it doesn’t look like the company has made any major headway in getting market share in the mobile search market recently. Today’s announcement is likely to change this, though we will have to wait and see what the actual numbers will look like once Apple releases the next version of the iPhone OS.
Image credit: gdgt
