Yahoo! and Facebook planning alliance?

The Sunday Telegraph rwports that Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg have discussed a possible collaboration between the two companies.

Yahoo! has seen many changes ever since Mayer took over, most of which revolve around its search engine. The new CEO has been putting all her focus on improving the capabilities of Yahoo!'s products.

A strong collaboration with Facebook could mean many things, particularly more traffic. With Facebook's one billion plus user base, Yahoo could get enough traffic. However, Yahoo! is in a contract with Microsoft, in which it has agreed to use Bing for a decade.

The news of these discussions do not come as a surprise, as the two companies are already resolving their patent issues and had also joined hands on a number of small projects. Also, Mayer and Sanderberg were colleagues at Google, that could facilitate such a possible joint venture.

Facebook's massive army of users run billions of searches everyday for information on their friends, favorite brands and more. A strong search partner could help them make these services more efficient and dynamic. Also, thanks to the power and the sheer size of the social network platform, the collaboration, if materialized, could serve as a breeding ground for some serious web and search based innovation.