Bing Really Loves The App Store

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Yesterday, we wrote about the arrival of Microsoft’s Bing app in Apple’s App Store. While Microsoft has now made a few apps for the iPhone, it’s still significant when the two bitter rivals play nice with one another. But from Bing’s perspective it makes sense. They’re trying to grow the service, and search on mobile is red hot, as is the iPhone, obviously. But perhaps more interesting is just how much Bing is promoting the App Store within its own search engine.

Doing a search for a number of popular mobile apps on Bing yields a prominent first result that pulls data from the App Store. These results include a big app icon, a description of the app, its price, its genre, and when it was released. Clicking on any of these elements will load up iTunes and take you to the App Store to get the app — again, all from Bing.

Not technically a web page, it would seem that Bing is injecting this data right into its results to make sure the user gets what they’re looking for. And that’s great, especially considering that Microsoft, of course, has a rival app store with Windows Marketplace. And their store contains many of the same apps that yield App Store results on Bing, such as Facebook and AIM.

Again, it’s great to see Microsoft giving top results to the Apple’s App Store despite the rivalry between the two, and the fact that the App Store directly competes with its own store. It’s hard to imagine Google doing the same thing ahead of its own Android apps.

Here are a few other examples of Bing App Store results:

Battleship

Red Laser

IMDb

Live Cams

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[thanks Travis]