• Bruce Clay, Thursday, April 3, 2008 1:31 PM

It seems that Google heard the rumblings and roars of the search community loud and clear--as the giant is looking to sell off Performics, the search marketing arm of DoubleClick.

"It's clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business," said Tom Phillips, Google's director of the DoubleClick Integration. "Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google's mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Perfomics search marketing business to a third party."

Actually, Google is splitting Performics into two divisions--an affiliate marketing company and a search firm, and spinning off the latter. As expected, the move has been met with applause from search bloggers. "It was just the right thing to do," Lisa Barone says. "Google's already freaking people out by owning nearly the entire online advertising market; they don't need to be dipping their toes in SEO on top of that."

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