Google: America’s biggest ad agency

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So Google is buying Doubleclick. From CNNMoney:

Search engine leader Google is buying privately held DoubleClick, a top digital marketing services firm, for $3.1 billion, the companies said Friday afternoon.

Google (Charts) is buying DoubleClick from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which bought DoubleClick in 2005 for $1.1 billion in a deal that took the company private.

For Google, the deal will likely help boost its presence in the area of Internet display advertising, ads on banners, videos and other non-text based types of ads.

Makes sense, I guess. Google dominates text-based advertising on the Web. Now it’s going for the display side of things. But I do wonder if, as the company gets ever farther away from its original focus on helping Web users find things and becomes an established, even dominant player in the advertising industry, if it will inevitably lose its edge in search. Not that there’s any sign of that happening yet, of course.