Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal reported that AOL's plan to buy Yahoo was so preliminary that it hadn't even included entered discussions with Yahoo.

"Putting AOL and Yahoo together is like tying two rocks together to make one of them float," Gabriel Consulting Group analyst Dan Olds has said previously of a potential Yahoo-AOL deal.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at or subscribe to . Her e-mail address is .

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