Launched in 1 June 2009, Bing has achieved tremendous success, way beyond analysts’ expectations. Within two months, it has managed to steal a small portion of market share from search engine giant Google, according to statistics provided by StatCounter. Currently, Bing’s market share hovers at around 3.82% but looks like it wouldn’t threaten Google’s dominance of the search market in the long run despite the recent lucrative Microsoft-Yahoo search deal. As Bing continues to grow, the Redmond guys are working fast to push Bing even further. Most of them have the ambition and goal to overtake Google somehow one day. That’s why they have been racking their brains and looking for any opportunity that will boost Bing’s market share.
The folks at Microsoft announced on Wednesday that they are working a software wrapper that iPhone app developers can make use of. With this integration, developers are able to add Bing search results to their applications without any much hassle. According to Alessandro Catorcini, senior program manager for the Bing search engine at Microsoft, Objective C-based wrapper is currently in testing mode and will be due in the next weeks.
Fortunately, Apple isn’t a player in the search engine market, and Bing has only Google to beat. By integrating their search system into iPhone apps, most probably there will be a significant jump in the number of Bing users. Millions of people are using one of the world’s most popular smartphone and targeting these potential users through the help of iPhone developers is indeed an ingenious and cost-effective idea.