Will Yahoo make a deal to buy AOL from Time Warner? - Oct. 28, 2006

"Yahoo must have a new appreciation of how Burger King feels about McDonald's: Constantly looking up at No. 1 gets vexing. So it should come as no surprise that Yahoo's chairman and CEO Terry Semel is mulling a number of moves that would impress Wall Street and steal the spotlight from the Google behemoth.
FORTUNE has learned from multiple sources that Yahoo (Charts) recently approached Time Warner (Charts) (parent of FORTUNE's publisher) about buying America Online - essentially trying to jump-start talks that broke down a year ago. A source close to Yahoo disputes that Yahoo approached Time Warner and says that there are no active conversations between the two companies. Regardless of which version is correct, a Yahoo-AOL merger would be a face-saver for Semel: Last year Google (Charts) outflanked Yahoo and swooped in to become AOL's exclusive Internet search provider, picking up a 5% stake in AOL for $1 billion as part of the deal."