Google has held its ground as the dominant leader of search for nearly the last decade. However, the same can be said of Google’s predecessor, Yahoo, who was thought impossible to defeat until Google entered the picture. Google’s innovation has a lot to do with their success, but the evolution of the web – and Google’s ability to both see and respond to it – is a more vital factor. It’s something well worth paying attention to, then, when new regions on the web are secured or addressed more fully by Google’s competitors.

One such area is mobile applications, where Microsoft has released an optimized version of Bing search. The smartphone rendition of the app made quite a showing, with easy-to-navigate pages and mobile-specific features. Considering that competitors – including both Yahoo and Google – had little more than a link to the mobile version of their page, Bing’s full-featured app made quite a stir. Since, however, Google has added HTML5 support while Yahoo has created a more fleshed-out version of their app.

Leading the pack again, Bing has created a second mobile version of their search, this time for the tablet market. While it covers much of the same ground as the iPhone/Android version of the app, Bing is also taking advantage of several additional app capabilities.

This can be seen most prominently in their focus on media-rich content. For the Bing tablet app, this includes:

• A movie trailers page.
• A “trends” page that shows the latest popular searches in a visual/image-based format. This feature is unique to the Bing iPad app.
• A rich search page that features the same sorts of images seen on Bing’s standard homepage.

Bing has also taken local features into consideration, providing details such as local weather and maps. To take advantage of all features, users must have an iPad withiOS 4.2+.