Reuters: eBay's Whitman: Google Is Not a Threat

Reuters reports that eBay CEO Meg Whitman downplayed speculation that its chief business partner, Google, was ready to become a big rival instead.

As with many stories where the main news hook is a denial, reporters and others are clearly not buying the denial. In reality, the opposite is true. eBay is already a rival of Google's in that it is a product search engine. True, Froogle is only in beta, and eBay is also one of Google's largest advertisers, but if searchers start going to eBay directly, then Google loses a searcher. More talk like this from Whitman might bring back the dreaded 1997 business bubble term "coopitition."