This stuff really ticks me off, because it's just stupid rumor-mongering.
Darryl Taft from eWeek visited Microsoft Research Asia recently, and in a discussion with Harry Shum, the director of MSR Asia, Harry said the following:
"I just talked to the head of Yahoo research in California," Shum told eWEEK in an interview. "He was saying he can really appreciate how difficult it is to do technology transfers, and especially this large number of technology transfers that we have done."
Microsoft Research and Yahoo Research both participate in the open research community, Unlike companies such as Google, who are super-secretive, don't publish papers, and don't contribute anything of substance to the research community, our folks are out there contributing, collaborating, and having great conversations with colleagues in other companies as well as in academia. To their credit, IBM, Sun, Xerox and HP also do this right. But the point is: we all talk to each other all the time. The head of Yahoo Research was in Beijing for a research conference, and he had a brief courtesy visit with Harry to say "hi."
But look at the article that eWeek posted about this. Now look again at the quote above -- which came out of this very article. Does it have anything to do with Microsoft and Yahoo teaming up against Google on search? Does it even mention search technologies? Does the word search even appear in it?
But of course, one rumor-mongering article wasn't enough -- ZD is running away with this one. First, Mary Jo Foley repeats the rumor even further out of context. Then she does it AGAIN now claiming that Microsoft Research and Yahoo Research are in "ongoing discussions about enhancing their respective search capabilities to better compete with Google."
And, of course, the blogosphere is picking this up and repeating it.
This really gives journalism a bad name. You would think it was a very slow news week, if they have to resort to using conversations between researchers to revive dead rumors about corporate alliances.
11:03:49 AM 
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