Yahoo Chief Executive Officer, Marissa Mayer, is in talks with Chief Operations Officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg for a partnership that could end the traditional relationship between Microsoft and Yahoo and could reshape the hierarchy of online giants, according to The Telegraph, citing sources close to the discussions .
The two giants of the IT & C who have previously collaborated in several smaller projects such as posting Yahoo news on Facebook, have already given up some lawsuits on ownership of patents, preferring to settle outside courtrooms. Officials of the two companies expect a closer co-operation in terms of search services on the Web.
Facebook recently announced plans to expand its search programs and a partnership with Yahoo would allow them to develop these programs and improve advertising services.
On the other hand, Yahoo, initially the most used search engine, dethroned by Google, could benefit from the more than a billion Facebook users.
Yahoo may also use the popularity of Facebook brand to attract top developers. In the last two years this has been a major problem for Yahoo, as more and more executives were fired.
Yahoo, along Facebook might become a fierce competitor for Google. Such a partnership could put an end to relations between Yahoo and Microsoft.
The two companies signed a partnership in 2009 which provided the terms for the Microsoft search engine, Bing, to power all Yahoo searches. Sources inside Yahoo say that there are a number of disagreements between the two companies, because Microsoft does not have enough specialists to counteract the strong competition from Google.
Although Yahoo wants to give up the contract drawn up for 10 years, the company could not manage the search engine issues on its own, as it doesn’t have enough “talented” programmers.
Google is the leading search engine, with a market share of 66%. Only 16% of internet searches are done through Bing search engine.
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