Sergey Brin Presses the Flesh

Presumably stung by Microsoft's (MSFT) announcement that it had already set up a Bing Twitter search page, Google (GOOG) alpha dog Sergey Brin shook up the Web 2.0 conference by, well, showing up and walking around. Really, that's all it takes to get everybody talking. That's some kinda juice.

Anyway, John Battelle chatted up the big guy about this and that, and the tech journos got out their notepads and started scribbling. TechCrunch has as thorough a transcript of the conversation as we've seen, and it's mostly Sergey being coy: Yes, we miss Tim Armstrong, who recently jumped ship to run AOL. No, I wasn't in on the new deal to feature tweets in Google search results. No, I've never tried to buy Twitter.

And then there's this delightful bit of bitchiness, courtesy of Search Engine Land:

Battelle: "Do you like Bing? You a Bing user?"

Brin: "I use all search engines out there. Bing reminds us that search is a competitive market. There's PowerSet, that Microsoft bought. There's Cuil. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on. It's a shame that Yahoo is abdicating."

"They would say they're not."

"Sorry. That was my impression."

And the shiv slips between the ribs! Yahoo (YHOO), of course, is trying to get a Microsoft search deal past the feds, and Brin accurately, if rather frankly, calls this a tacit admission that they just can't compete on their own. We never knew Russians had a gift for understatement.