Windows Phone 7 users – no Google for you! If you want to search from your Windows Phone 7 handset, Microsoft’s Bing search engine will be your only option by default.
Microsoft may have worked with Apple to allow Bing to be the default search too on the iPhone, doing the same on Windows Phone 7 is not going to be possible.
In an interview with Pocket Lint, Microsoft’s senior product manager Greg Sullivan said that there are no plans to let any other search engine’s take over as the default search tool for Microsoft’s new mobile OS. The reason? “The search engine has been heavily integrated into the OS, so it would be hard to offer an alternative,” according to Sullivan.
One example of this deep integration is Tell Me – Microsoft’s equivalent of Google Voice Search, which allows quick voice searches of both the web and the phone. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 guidelines state that all Windows Phone 7 handsets must include a dedicated Bing search button. While it will be possible to create a Google (or Yahoo, etc. but let’s be honest – this is about Google) app or homescreen Hub to allow alternative searches, Bing will be the only engine that can be linked to the Bing button or to Tell Me and it will take a lot more effort to search by alternate means.
This kind of ‘deep integration’ does sound a little bit like the justification that Microsoft used for making Internet Explorer such an integral part of the desktop version of Windows and for which the company has been slapped in various anti-trust and anti-competitiveness actions around the world. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
TBC | £tbc | Microsoft (via Pocket Lint)
