Microsoft announced today that they are bringing their Bing search engine to Android. Seems kind of odd that Google is going to allow this, as Google is the number one search engine and Bing is competition. Bing is low on the market share of search engines. Bing will be included on new Windows Mobile 7 phones and they do have an application for IPhone. You can’t blame Microsoft for wanting to be on the hottest mobile phone platform today. Look for Bing shortly on your Android phone.
SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft Senior Vice President Satya Nadella said on Tuesday that he is pleased that Bing has gained nearly 5 percentage points of market share in its first year, but said he is not kidding himself into thinking that is a victory.
“None of us are confused,” Nadella said. “We are a low-share player.”
Microsoft now has double-digit market share, but barely, said Nadella, who heads up engineering efforts in the company’s Online Services Division. Still he said the company has made progress on nearly every metric since launching Bing a year ago. In addition to gaining share, Nadella noted that 64 percent of people have what is known as “unaided awareness” of Bing–basically it means they actually know what it is and can name it–something that wasn’t the case with Live Search, Microsoft’s prior search brand.
Nadella’s comments came at the start of a search event at Microsoft’s sales office here and as the latest ComScore numbers show Bing continuing to gain share, even if you take out some dubious queries, such as slideshows.
Microsoft isn’t announcing a lot of new things at this event, but it is talking for the first time about plans for a Bing Android client as well as new mapping features and a new TV listings feature that is in testing and about to launch.