Bing Spreads Wings in Apple's App Store

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) released an app for its Bing search engine in the iTunes App Store on Tuesday. This free app works on the iPhone and iPod touch.

Its features include voice search, geolocation and mapping.

Bing the Smartypants

The Bing app for the iPhone and iPod touch has been launched less than a month after Microsoft released a BlackBerry version of the app. Bing apps are also available on Windows Mobile, BREW, and the Danger operating system, which runs on SideKick devices from T-Mobile.

Despite Microsoft's rivalry with Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) in many fields, it's sound marketing strategy for Redmond to get onto as many mobile operating systems as possible, according to Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat. "Search engines have to do two things: Give people a compelling reason to use them, and be the first thing they go to," he told MacNewsWorld. "Most of the search engines have similar features," he said.

"I think Microsoft realizes it has to move to where the people are, which is the iPhone and Android," Greg Sterling, founding principal at Sterling Market Intelligence, pointed out. "Windows Mobile is a smaller audience than these two," he told MacNewsWorld.

About the Bing App on iTunes

The Bing app in the iTunes app store uses Seadragon technology for panning and zooming in maps, said Justin Jed in the Bing community blog. Seadragon was developed by Seattle Software, which Microsoft purchased in 2006.

Seadragon, a free Web service which is part of Microsoft LiveLabs, combines several technologies to let users view, zoom, pan-into, and share large images on the Internet without degrading or shrinking them. It works with all types of content, regardless of the amount of data used or the network's bandwidth. Seadragon is incorporated into Silverlight.

Bing for the iPhone and iPod touch works well in conducting Web searches or searching maps using voice technology, Jed claimed.

Some users, however, have begged to differ. Several iPhone users complained that the voice features wouldn't work on their devices. "iPhone 3G app simply crashes whenever I try and use the voice features," wrote user "ChadT." Users "nanexcool" and "robin capper" had the same problem with their iPhone 3Gs. "Robin capper" found that voice search either crashed his iPhone or did not return any results. "It's not connectivity, as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) on the same phone shows," he wrote.

On the other hand, Sterling found that voice search worked for him on the iPod touch. Some technical differences could have led to the different results. "Microsoft told me they turned off some of the app's features for the iPod touch," he said.

Battling for Market Share

As an overall search engine, Bing is fighting hard for turf in the field. It's clearly third after market leader Google and runner-up Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO), but whether or not it has gained ground depends on which research firm's results you look at.

For example, Comscore's October results showed Google had 65.4 percent of online search market share in the United States; Yahoo Sites had 18 percent; and Microsoft Sites had 9.9 percent. Google gained 4 percent over its September results, while Yahoo lost 1 percent and Microsoft Sites gained 8 percent.

For November, Hitwise showed that Google had about 71.6 percent of the U.S. search market, up 1 percent; Yahoo had about 15.4 percent, down 0.75 percent; and Bing had 9.34 percent of the market, down about 2 percent.

Comscore had not yet released November figures by press time.

"Microsoft needs to be able to get people to try Bing out," Sterling said. "The question is, will people download and use it?"

The battle for mobile screen time could echo that for the desktop, contended Allen Nogee, an analyst at In-Stat. "I don't think the situation is much different from the desktop browser war," he told MacNewsWorld. "But I think people care more about what's on their desktop browser than on their mobile platform."