Yes, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has said it is once again looking at making acquisitions, but no, Microsoft isn’t planning to take that route to bulk up in search. CEO Steve Ballmer — who seems to be on quite the interview circuit as of late — tells Reuters that he does not expect the company to buy up other search players. Of course, Microsoft has already wrapped up the biggest player it could likely get in the market: Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), via its search partnership. Still, the comment is somewhat surprising, considering that so many of the features that Microsoft has either introduced or emphasized with the relaunch of its search engine as Bing can directly be traced back to acquisitions. Among them: Microsoft’s purchase of Jellyfish.com led to Cashback; the Farecast acquisition cumulated in Bing Travel; and other features have come from its buy of semantic search firm Powerset.
No word on why search acquisitions would be off the table, and in all fairness, Ballmer’s remarks are very limited — but Microsoft certainly has boosted its own internal search R&D via hiring. It’s also set to get at least 400 search employees from Yahoo if the partnership gets regulatory approval. Over at AllThingsD, Peter Kafka hypothesizes that Microsoft is likely to concentrate instead on trying to get its search engine on AOL (NYSE: TWX) — or News Corp (NYSE: NWS). properties.
Separately, Ballmer is keeping to his cautious outlook on the potential for an economic recovery. “Right now, I feel like we’re not likely to see a recovery,” he tells the BBC, adding that he thinks the economy will “bump along the bottom” for several years. He says much the same thing to CNET in an interview. See the transcript of those remarks here. As we’ve noted before, this is quite the contrast to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, who has said that the economy is improving globally.

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