According to a recent report in the UK's The Sunday Telegraph newspaper, citing unnamed `inside' sources, Facebook and Yahoo are apparently discussing the prospect of collaborating on a Web-based search service.

The Sunday Telegraph sources revealed ion the condition of anonymity that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg - the two top-notch female executives, who were former colleagues at Google - are currently in talks about what might turn out to be a noteworthy search coalition between Facebook and Yahoo.

Despite the fact that there is already some overlap between Facebook and Yahoo, The Sunday Telegraph sources said that the board members of the two companies are hopeful that the talks between Sandberg and Mayer may "lead to much more substantial collaboration based around web-based search."

An alliance between Facebook and Yahoo will be a mutually beneficial one, as it will help Yahoo offer substantial competition to Google, with the help of Facebook's over 1 billion user-base; while Facebook, in turn, will be able to use Yahoo for bringing about an improvement in its search features, thereby perking up its advertising platform.

In fact, Facebook has already been hinting at `search' for the last few months, with the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly saying in a September statement: "There is a big opportunity in search, evolving to giving a set of answers to a specific question and Facebook is uniquely positioned to do that."