Verizon Wireless pushing Bing as the only search option?

Surely you don’t think RIM has that kind of control over their own smartphones (they bend over backwards for their carrier partners). That leaves us to assume that Verizon Wireless has struck a deal with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to be the search engine of choice on their BlackBerry products. That’s fine and dandy (get that money, boo boo), but what’s really upsetting to most users is that there isn’t an option to change to another provider. No, we’re not kidding, you can not switch to Google or Wikipedia like you used to be able to.

We’ve reached out to Verizon and are waiting to hear back. In the meantime, what do you guys think?

UPDATE: Verizon Wireless told us, “The default to our BlackBerry devices is now bing!” and that if you’d like to use another search provider, you can “go to web – bookmark, make favorite, download. Also – you can to Appworld and download Google quicksearch client for free and move it from the Downloads folder to have a link on the home screen.”

Tags: Bing, BlackBerry, google, RIM, search engine, verizon wireless, Yahoo

Jonathan S. Geller