Google is used as a verb instead of ‘searching’. Bing/Yahoo have a long way to go before they steal permanent market share.  At this point I suspect Microsoft will shovel money into marketing for the next few years with no hope of generating anything close to a profit.  They have a big stockpile of money, but at some point shareholders will complain.  When the marketing ends, their product better deliver results as good or better than Google.  I doubt that will be the case.

The search algorithm seems fairly straight forward for Bing.  Unfortunately big company sites with huge budgets and blackhat auto link techniques will be more effective on Bing than Google.

My prediction:  the simple nature of the search algorithm used by Bing will be either exploited and results will look like your email spam folder, or they will look like Forbes 500 list — neither is as useful as Google’s results.

Using the Firefox Browser and SEO Quake you can perform this search on Yahoo: “linkdomain:urlgoeshere.com –domain:urlgoeshere.com” and easily scan the PR of all the top links for your competition. Be sure to replace ‘urlgoeshere.com’ with the sites you wish to investigate (leave out the http://www.) SEO Quake has a setting that allows you to view PR for Yahoo. Only do this search in Yahoo, it won’t work in Google.

Turn off the settings that show back links for Google and Yahoo. If you leave those settings on Google and Yahoo may temporarily block your IP address for overusing the search engines.

Now you can scan and click links to judge how difficult it will be to surpass the top ranking sites in your niche.