Bing for the iPhone? It's on the way.

Half a year after the official launch of Microsoft's Bing search engine, Bing still has no presence on the popular Apple App Store. The reason is pretty obvious: Microsoft would prefer you ditched your iPhone for a Windows-equipped handset.

But in an interview Wednesday with CNET, Microsoft principal group program manager David Raissipour said that Microsoft was in the process of developing some kind of Bing iPhone app.

"Everyone understands the popularity and the pervasiveness of the platform," Raissipour said, referring to the iPhone. "We are actively working on it." Time table? Unclear.

For this blogger, a Bing iPhone app would be more than welcome. Although we use Google as our primary engine, Bing churns out a lot of data that Google doesn't. It would be great to have that option on the small screen. And to judge by the numbers put up by Bing, a lot of you probably agree.

Yesterday, Satya Nadella, senior vice president for online services at Microsoft, said that Bing's unique users have grown by 16 percent since May, when the site first launched.

As we noted yesterday, the search engine's market share has also quintupled from 1.9 percent to 9.9 percent – a figure that shows Bing has more users, and more dedicated searchers.

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