The Telegraph credited an unnamed source for its information, which asserts that the chief executive of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer and the chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg have held discussions over establishing a partnership.

The rationale behind such an agreement is predicated on Facebook’s desire to provide a better search function for its users, in a bid to ingratiate the social network into everyday life to an even greater extent.

“Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of questions people have ‘what sushi restaurant friends like’. These are queries you could potentially do on Facebook if we built it out … at some point we’ll do it … we have a team working on search,” noted founder Mark Zuckerberg at an industry event held earlier this year.

An improved search facility would also aid in “targeting advertising more efficiently”.

Yahoo!, on the other hand, would gain access to Facebook’s 1 billion plus subscribers, which will aid its quest to capture market share form search leader Google. This is because the algorithms used in search engines have a proportional relationship with its user-base – the more people that use it the more powerful it becomes.

The struggling search firm would also benefit from a greater pool of programmers, whether it is from sharing personnel or becoming a more attractive prospect to top-tier talent due to its new affiliation with the currently more successful Facebook.

AllThingsD, however, has discredited such postulations as it cites its own sources who say that such an alliance is not taking place due to Yahoo! remaining committed to its search partnership with Microsoft.

The two firms came to terms in 2009, with the ten year agreement seeing Bing – Microsoft’s search engine – becoming the source engine for Yahoo!’s search results, therefore allowing it to focus on gaining ad revenues.

The partnership has done little to eat at the dominance of Google which still holds 66 per cent of the market, with Bing only holding 16 per cent. Recruitment has also continued to remain lacklustre as both companies struggle to keep hold of skilled labour.

The report goes on to mention that Mayer has contacted Yahoo!’s Redmond-based partners in an effort to improve their alliance and address performance concerns.

by Oluseun Alufa

The Government of India (Gol) has reportedly authorised an investigation, to look into the alleged violation of forex (foreign exchange) laws by the US based Internet outfits of Yahoo and Google, in Indian.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, notices have been already served to the Indian units of both the Internet giants, where inputs have been taken from an unnamed senior official in GoI’s federal finance ministry.

On being approached for further details, a spokesperson from the finance ministry declined to clarify whether or not notices had been sent to the companies.

“We have an obligation to our shareholders to set up a tax efficient structure and our present structure is compliant with the tax rules in all the countries where we operate,” a Google India spokeswoman confirmed, as reported by Reuters.

The spokeswoman has claimed that the company was yet to receive a notice from GoI on the issue.

This new development will certainly act as an insult to injury for both the firms – Google in particular. Only recently, both Google and Yahoo, alongside a handful of other Internet companies, were dragged through an Indian court for not taking appropriate measures to block religiously sensitive content on their respective sites.