Rising sales of Android smartphones could be good news for Google Search

Technology research giant Gartner has released its smartphone sales report for the first quarter of 2011 and the figures are striking: Android sales represent more than a third of global smartphone sales for that time period. In total, an impressive 36% of smartphones sold are driven by the Android operating system.

Google Search is the default search engine for Android phones, meaning that more and more mobile customers are viewing its ranked searches and using its linked Google apps package.

Apple iOS phones accounted for 16.8% of worldwide smartphone sales. This acts as a further boost for Google, as again the search engine is the default one for iPhones.

By contrast, other makes of smartphone appear to be struggling in the market.

Microsoft’s smartphones achieved a tiny 3.6% of sales: just 1.6 million of the phones were sold across the world during the first quarter.

Although this means far less mobile consumer exposure to Bing, Google’s search engine rival did get a boost in respect of BlackBerry sales. These handsets use Bing as their default search engine and they represented 12.9% of smartphone sales.

The results suggest that mobile search engine marketers should continue to focus their efforts on smartphone providers who partner with Google.