Google May Power MySpace Search

Google and Microsoft are in talks with MySpace to power MySpace's internal search, according to Financial Times.

A senior executive of one of the companies told: "They are looking for a partner and trying to figure it out. They have a good opportunity to increase the revenue on that property."

"Search engines need to encourage more searching [to build revenue] and youth audiences are spending increasing amounts of time on social sites," says Julian Smith, online advertising analyst at Jupiter Research. "So whoever provides the search facility to MySpace will generate a lot of traffic, search results and, ultimately, revenue."

For now, MySpace sends 8.2% of its traffic to Google, according to HitWise.