Anyone looking for proof that Facebook and Google don't have the best working relationship got it during Facebook's earnings call on Wednesday.
"Our relationship with Google isn't one where the companies really talk," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the call in response to a question about Facebook's integration with iOS 6. "We are able to do a bunch of things because they have an open platform."
It was a striking admission and all the more so considering the glowing terms Zuckerberg used right after to describe Facebook's relationship with Apple: "They've been a great partner for us so far and we're really excited about doing more there and people enjoy the integration that we have with them."
Facebook and Google have clashed a bit more in public recently. In an interview with Wired earlier this month, Google CEO Larry Page slammed Facebook for doing a "really bad job" with its products.
Facebook's decision to get deeper into search with the launch of Graph Search -- and to partner more closely with Google's rival Microsoft Bing -- likely hasn't exactly helped close the rift between the companies. During Google's earnings call earlier this month, Page downplayed the threat Graph Search poses to its search business by noting that "we have been at that for quite a while and made investments in all sorts of areas."
Zuckerberg took a similar approach to deflect a question about competing with Google during the earnings call yesterday. "I think we're just coming from a completely different place," Zuckerberg said. "Our whole product is people in structured connections to other people and content and things that they like, whereas traditional Web search is the exact opposite... I think Google and others may be trying to put in some of the structured foundations, but we just have years of having built that up."
So there you have it: Both companies say they're not really concerned about competing with one another, and yet the two are still not on speaking terms.