It has recently been found that the market share currently held by Bing and Yahoo on the iPhone is tiny compared to that of Google, which controls almost all of the search traffic on the handset.

According to information from the ad network Chitika the recent excitement over the much tighter integration of Microsoft Bing with Facebook has done nothing to alter 97 percent search traffic that Google currently enjoys on the Apple iPhone.

When broken down the downloadable Google app only accounts for 8.68 percent of its traffic on the iPhone, while the safari toolbar uses Google for 49 percent of its searches and the Google homepage itself covers 42.24 percent of the traffic.

The main two search engine spots on the popular iPhone are currently both held by Google with Safari and the Google App considered as two separate sources according to Dan Ruby, an analyst for Chitika.

The combination of Google’s position as the main search engine in the US and the contract it has to be the default search engine for Apple has provided it with its high placement and huge market share in the search engine arena. It would appear that not many users change search engines once they start using Google as Apple found when it gave users of its iPhone 4 the option of changing to either Bing or Yahoo and found that few users actually opted for these search engines.

When considering the Safari tool bar, their App and their search engine it was found that Bing only holds a .58 percent share for searches on the iPhone whilst Yahoo fares only slightly better with just 2.25 percent. Ruby did, however, advise that the search traffic for Bing could possibly be as high as 1 to 4 percent as no referral URL was sent by the Bing App on the iPhone making it difficult to precisely measure its affect on search traffic.

Source – Eweek Europe