Apple’s chief executive Steve Jobs announced during his keynote speech at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) on June 7 that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will be one of the search engine options – along with Google and Yahoo - on the forthcoming iPhone 4.

While Google will remain the default search engine for the new handset, despite the intense mobile space rivalry that Apple and Google are involved in; the availability of Bing on the new iPhone highlights a notable step for Microsoft, a fact that has been acknowledged by the company’s senior VP Yusuf Mehdi.

In a blog post, Mehdi said: “Apple has announced that Bing will be included as one of the search engine choices within Safari on iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and within the Safari browser on the Mac and PC. Needless to say, we are excited that Bing will be included as an option in Safari because it will make it easier for you to search and get the benefits of Bing.”

With Bing becoming a search engine option on the iPhone, Microsoft will apparently gain some additional market share in the mobile search-engine arena, which is largely being dominated by Internet search biggie Google.

As per analytics firm StatCounter, Google presently boasts a whopping 97.83 percent of the global mobile-search market share; with Yahoo and Bing having barely 1.19 percent and 0.38 percent share respectively.