I guess things are tough all over -- even Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is laying off people. For the first time, the tech darling of the internet will be cutting a large number of jobs, with the reductions coming from the company's new DoubleClick workforce. Google completed its purchase DoubleClick on March 11, and it was widely expected that the Goog would fire some of DoubleClick's 1,500 employees. According to The New York Times, though, the 300 number is larger than expected.
Google is also planning on selling Performics Search Marketing, a unit of DoubleClick. Performics is a search engine marketing company that gets paid to place ads on search engines. This could interfere, or appear to interfere, with Google's objectivity when ranking -- and charging for -- page popularity. So bye bye Performics!
Google has about 17,000 employees worldwide, having added over 6,000 in 2007. CEO Eric Schmidt has promised to slow the pace of hiring in the coming months.
Twitter valuation off by half: NeXt Up Research
Comfort Zone Investing: The unmighty dollar
Five winners of a weak dollar
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-03-2008 @ 6:22PM
NewsVisual said...
Google’s rosy past could also be limited by more intense competition. Yahoo! Inc continues to forge ahead with a determined spirit as it embarks upon cutting-edge business ventures, including a new venture with the Massachusetts-based start-up company Vlingo Corp. This new venture could help Yahoo to challenge Google Inc’s dominance of the Internet-based mobile services market. Yahoo plans to compete with Google in this burgeoning market by offering search services that use speech-recognition technology. More specifically, Yahoo will implement its new oneSearch 2.0 mobile search services in partnership with Vlingo Corp, already a leading speech-recognition company, Yahoo reported in a press release. "With the voice-enabled version of Yahoo! oneSearch, consumers can search for anything, including flight numbers, locations, Web-site names, local restaurants, and more, by simply speaking," Yahoo said in its release.