Microsoft Bing goes Mobile

As you know, Microsoft has been promoting its new search engine Bing aggressively for the past few weeks. As an important part of that promotion campaign, it has made Bing the official search engine of Verizon Wireless phones.

Microsoft signed a five-year deal with Verizon a few months back in an attempt to promote its new search engine to mobile users. According to the deal, Bing will be the default search engine of Verizon phones. Users will be able to check out the search engine from Verizon’s portal or through browsers like Opera. Also, it has been announced that a lot of high end phones from Verizon will come preloaded with Bing later this year.

So far, the response for this move has been quite good. According to the mobile media division of Microsoft, Bing handled nearly 19 million queries in the first 20 days which is a pretty good figure.

Interestingly, Microsoft has signed a deal with Hyatt as well. According to this deal, Microsoft will put ads on Verizon phones, upon clicking which the users will be directed to the hotel chain’s website. Verizon users will be able to book rooms, sign up for the hotel’s loyalty program, and check in through their mobile phones.

Rumor has it that Microsoft paid nearly $600 million for the deal with Verizon. Considering how hard Microsoft has been trying to compete with Yahoo and Google, two companies that have a very strong presence in the mobile industry, this comes as no surprise to me. It will be interesting to see how Bing copes with Yahoo Search and Google.

Categories: All things mobile phones, Microsoft, Mobile Web.

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Google becomes the default search engine on Opera mobile browser

From now on, Opera Mobile users and Opera Mini users will see a default Google search bar on the start page. Opera and Google recently got into an agreement wherein Google will be the default search engine in both Opera Mobile and Opera Mini mobile browsers. In case you don’t know, Opera Mobile is the mobile browser for smartphones and PDAs and Opera Mini is the mobile browser for low-end mobile phones.

Interestingly, Yahoo was the one who partnered with Opera last year to make it the default search engine in Opera mobile browser. But now both Yahoo and Opera have called off the agreement and Google has used this opportunity to its advantage.

This would be a fruitful partnership for Google, as Opera mobile browser is used by tens of millions of users all over the world. If you remember, Yahoo became the default search engine for T-Mobile in Europe some time back, replacing Google. Now, Google has replaced Yahoo and has become the default search engine for Opera. This, as they say, is competition at its best.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, Google, All things mobile phones.

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