Hasta La Gadget!

Motorola will be loading Microsoft’s Bing search onto its Android cellphones in China this month, ousting Google on its own smartphone platform. Motorola Android models will get the new feature when they are launched in this quarter.

Google isn’t being completely ejected from its own party: Bing, along with an alternative to Google maps, will be offered as a choice to customers when they first fire up the phone. We imagine that, as Google is the second most popular search engine after Baidu, that most people will still opt for it over Bing.

Why would Motorola do this? Speculation from the Wall Street Journal says that Motorola is planning for a future when Google may pull out of China. Reuters says that “Having search alternatives on the Android phones should lessen Motorola’s dependence on Google.” We have a much less conspiratorial explanation: Money. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo pay company’s to make their search the default. The Mozilla Foundation, for example, received $66 million from Google in 2007 for search royalties.

Could it be that, in an effort to increase its market share, Bing is offering more money than Google? Perhaps Motorola is just playing it smart, adding the new, money-spinning Bing while keeping Google and its own customers happy by keeping the old options around?

It’s a moot point anyway, we guess. Pretty much anyone knows how to type google.com into the URL-bar.

Motorola: Microsoft To Provide Search Functions On Its New Phones [WSJ]

Motorola, Microsoft in deal to put Bing on phones [Reuters]

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com