I think the biggest factor will be web browser bundling and name recognition. Yahoo & Google are household names. Bing has a way to go in that area. Although it has the benefit of being bundled with IE8 and Windows 7. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox generally default to using Google as their search engines. Where IE8 defaults to Bing. Yahoo is only gaining marketshare through browser plugins and widgets and is slowly loosing their crowd. Here are some interesting stats from a SearchInsider article forwarded from a colleague and friend.
Source: SearchInsider
I think Google and Bing would be best to differentiate themselves in how they are used. Google for research and Bing for commercial search might make sense. Your thoughts?
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Yahoo looks like the biggest casualty of this war. As is often the case when you have a really dominant market leader, the also-rans only have the option of fighting over the crumbs. Also, consider the way Microsoft decides what to do with their software in every new release. That’s not the kind of power I would ever want running my ‘decision’ engine!
Yahoo is looking like the biggest casualty. They used to be the leaders in this industry and provided quite a bit of innovation in search engines and the creation of a personal portal framework.
I’m not that familiar with how the whole Microsoft team makes decisions. They do spend a considerable amount of resources though making sure that when a decision gets made that it gets carried out.