Consumers shouldn’t expect to be overwhelmed with search options if they decide to buy Windows Phone 7 devices.  A high-ranking Microsoft employee has revealed that there will be only one default search engine: Bing.

Microsoft, with its 90,000 or so employees, supposedly ran into some technical problems when it came to accommodating search rivals.  Greg Sullivan, a senior product manager at the company, explained to Stuart Miles, "The search engine has been heavily integrated into the OS, so it would be hard to offer an alternative."

You can either blame or thank the physical search button that Windows Phone 7 devices will sport, along with Tellme voice search integration.

Google and Yahoo fans – along with antitrust regulators – don’t need to get too worked up over this issue, however.  Miles wrote, "Sullivan . . . said that Microsoft would allow other search engines to create an app, or even, presumably, a hub . . ."

Google.com, Yahoo.com, and lots of other sites should be pretty easy to access, too, of course.

It’ll just be interesting to see if the lack of default search engine options bothers the average consumer, or perhaps boosts the popularity of Bing.