Google, seeking to avoid possible conflicts of interest, has decided it is to rid of DoubleClick's Performics, which employs 200 staff and focuses on search marketing. Tom Phillips, director of DoubleClick's integration efforts with Google, confirmed that this is the main reason for selling the unit.

"It's clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business," Tom Phillips said on a company blog. "Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google's mission and core to the trust we ask from our users," he claims.

The service devises technical tricks to highlight Web sites among the non-advertising results of searches, which is a technique that Google does not encourage. It is well known that the company has taken pride in guaranteeing that its non-advertising search results cannot be bought. "Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion or ranking in them," Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin promised in 2004.

Google now has more than 18,000 employees worldwide, which means that the 300 people shed are just a few percent of its workforce. However, this is still the biggest layoff in the Mountain View-based company's nine year history. No buyer was announced yet, but finding one will not be a problem.

Almost one year after Google announced its intention to acquire DoubleClick, the deal has been finalized last month and the plans for integrating the two are ongoing. The exact plans of what is going to happen from now on haven’t been revealed, but Google promised to offer regular news about the process of integrating the two companies. One thing that has been communicated was that they will first start organizing the employees of the two businesses, a process that is said to end in April.

Last year in April Google announced the agreement to acquire DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion in cash from Hellman & Friedman, the San Francisco equity firm, along with JMI Equity and Management, in an attempt to offer users an improved experience and relevance of advertising on the Web.