Mike Isaac

Recent Posts by Mike Isaac

Confirmed: Facebook Not in Search Talks With Yahoo

Just like we told you yesterday, Facebook and Yahoo are not currently in talks to form a search alliance or build a search engine together.

“People expect a better search experience on Facebook,” a Facebook spokesman told us in a statement. “We are working on improvements to better meet those expectations but are not in talks to enter into a new search partnership.”

The denial comes just one day after an erroneous report published in the Sunday Telegraph, where reporter Katherine Rushton cited anonymous sources saying Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg were in the midst of discussions to form a search partnership.

As my boss, Kara Swisher, wrote on Sunday, a deal like this wouldn’t work for a number of reasons. The social giant is already tied up in a long-term search deal with Microsoft and its Bing search engine. Not to mention that Yahoo outsourced its core search tech to Microsoft long ago. (Read Danny Sullivan’s post for another great takedown of the Telegraph report.)

This isn’t to say that Facebook isn’t working on search at all. Indeed, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the TechCrunch: Disrupt conference in September, the company is definitely interested in search, and will be making moves in the arena in the future.

But those moves will likely be moves of its own, not working on search tech with partners like Yahoo.

Chalk another one up to the rumor mill.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik