Apple adds Microsoft Bing as iPhone search option

On stage at the Worldwide Developers Conference today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that Microsoft’s Bing search engine would be an option in the next version of the iPhone operating system, iOS4.

The news comes after months of speculation that Apple might dump Google as the iPhone’s default search engine. The latest report in that vein came from TechCrunch, which updated its post based on new sources who said it was “more complicated” than Bing replacing Google. As we’ve seen today, Bing isn’t replacing Google at all, and is instead an optional search engine alongside Yahoo.

In addition, Jobs briefly showed off and praised Bing’s HTML5-driven mobile site. The site, which has been around for some time already, offers a more stylish alternative to Google and Yahoo’s mobile search sites. In December, Microsoft released its free Bing iPhone app, which was similarly more stylish than other iPhone search engine apps.

The latest Bing usage numbers from Hitwise showed that the search engine was slowly creeping up in market share while both Google and Yahoo dropped slightly. Bing’s inclusion in the iPhone will certainly help increase its popularity — but since it’s an optional feature, and you need to drill down into menus to activate it, I don’t suspect it will ever be a major threat to Google’s position as the iPhone’s default search option.

[Image via GDGT]