I've written about Search Engine Market Share a couple of times over the last year - but those numbers were usually from Comscore or HitWise; now Compete.com is providing Actual Search Market Share numbers - not estimated numbers (and  Jeremy Crane mentions some good surprises to come in the near future with Compete's data).

The Search Engine market has matured - what the chart above shows is the other players (Yahoo, MSN/Live, Ask, AOL) are unlikely to achieve any significant search market gain anytime in the near future.

Looking at these numbers ……it's time for Microsoft to buy Yahoo!  Save Google Imploding- the numbers will stay more or less the same for the next 2-3 years unless there's acquisition.  There's only two possibilities that make sense

1. AOL buys Yahoo  (unlikely)

2. Microsoft buys Yahoo

There's not much more to say about it - this is just my opinion, btw, I have no personal knowledge that any of this will or will not happen.