Google's reported attempt to keep employees loyal to the company comes as its intensifies. The two companies have a wide-ranging battleground -- from search engines to -based office applications and .

And now a is beginning to heat up.

Last month, Facebook when it launched an effort to tie search more closely to social networking. Industry analysts said Microsoft's Bing search engine has failed to steal much, if any, of Google's share of the search market. However, by taking advantage of Facebook's worldwide popularity, Bing could start to make some gains.

More recently, Google and Facebook have been in something of a war of words surrounding the issue of data portability. The contention boils down to the ability to move user data back and forth between Web services, such as Google's Gmail and Facebook.

Analysts speculate that such issues could end up exposing Google's Achilles' heel.