Make it official: Google's not immune from the bad economy and plummeting ad market. We've been hearing for weeks that Google would have layoffs. Google is cutting 200 employees today, the company now confirms.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told the BBC that the U.S. should break up banks that get "too big to fail." What about Google? Is it too big — and should the government take action?

As promised, Google has found a buyer for Performics, the search-marketing business it acquired when it bought DoubleClick. French ad conglomerate Publicis will take the Chicago-based company off Google's hands for an amount that so far remains undisclosed — probably because the fire-sale price will be low enough to be immaterial to both companies. [Reuters]

In 2004, DoubleClick bought Performics for $58 million and came out with the DoubleClick's Performics affiliate ad network, a system which pays publishers after users click on an ad and make a purchase or take some other action. Now, after Google's acquired DoubleClick, its rebranded the network as the Google Affiliate Network, signaling the search giant's entry into cost-per-action advertising, after tentative experiments. [News.com]

Yahoo executives want to let Google serve ads next to its search results. But that would mean Google would be selling ads on 80 percent of all search queries online. Microsoft won't let that happen without stirring up antitrust fears in Washington. Secret Google sources tell the New York Times they plan to get around these concerns by schooling regulators on the concept of "co-opetition," which they say what Toyota does when it sells hybrid engines to GM, or when Whirlpool makes appliances for Sears.

What's so bad about Mozilla's Toronto workspace? Besides the fluorescent lighting, the colorless white walls and the folding tables, the worst thing about Mozilla's Toronto workspace is how we're sure management would improve it. With corporate graffiti, company logos and too many colors. That was management's trick at Facebook and look where readers ranked it in our poll on tech's ten worst workspaces — as tech's second-worst workspace, just after Mozilla. Check out the full list, below.

After reviewing our post "The 10 worst workspaces in tech," commenter AdmNaismith described Facebook's office, pictured above, as "foggy, dank, dim, and utterly depressing." Commenter mothra1 hated Yahoo's New York offices more: "They suck! Lifeless and impersonal. Kinda like the douchebags who still actually work there." Meanwhile, Adobe apologist BlairHapjo told us we "clearly didn't get past Adobe's lobby," and the rest of the office features "Aeron chairs, real offices (with doors!), big picture windows." For us, the worst offices we found on Office Snapshots and elsewhere were the the ones that try too hard to seem Internet-hip, like Jajah and Google. Now it's time to settle the disputes. Below, vote for your least favorite and help us rank tech's 10 most dismal places to work:

Google's collection of Web properties somtimes seem unconnected and disorganized. But there's a common thread between Print Ads, Audio Ads, TV Ads, Checkout, YouTube, Postini and DoubleClick. Can you guess what it is?

We've toured the top 10 workspaces in tech. Click to viewNow, we've gone back to Office Snapshots to find the 10 worst. What makes them so bad? Some offend with exposed fluorescent lights, gray cubicles and a dystopian corporate sheen. But others, with their pseudo-hip graffiti, kindergarten toys and plastic decorations — all in a desperate attempt to seem "Internet-y" — come off even worse. We'll start with Yahoo's New York digs.

DoubleClick
Here is DoubleClick's office in Colorado. I've never been there, but I know for a fact there are more Cathy cartoons pinned against gray cubicle felt in this office than any other in tech. (Photos by Ben Saitz)

Engineers hate it when suits put them on public deadlines, because they then can't spend months twiddling code to perfection. That's exactly what Google CEO Eric Schmidt did yesterday when he told CNBC's Maria Bartiromo that the integration of DoubleClick's ad-serving platform into Google's AdWords would take six months. Better get cracking, boys.

Last year, Google placated privacy-minded opponents of its DoubleClick acquisition with promises to create a new kind of Web browser "cookie," a file which keeps personally identifiable information about a website's users. Now that Google has swallowed DoubleClick, the online advertising company seems to have lost its interest in developing these so-called "crumbled cookies," the Financial Times reports. Google CEO Eric Schmidt that's because cookies are too complex for Google to deal with. "What we've discovered about cookies is that every question leads to a one-hour conversation," Schmidt said. Please, folks, be a little more understanding: It's not that Google doesn't want to answer difficult questions about privacy. They're just too busy.

A recently departed DoubleClicker tells us that Google managers asked employees at the online ad company it acquired last month to sign one-year noncompete agreements. Most agreed, thinking that it would spare their jobs — but then layoffs came a week later. They were "pretty pissed" over the bait-and-switch and were forced to find jobs outside their industry. The text of the noncompete is below.

Google offered laid-off DoubleClick employees two options: take two months pay and find work at a competitor or take four months pay and join another industry. Some lucky DoubleClick employees were offered contract positions, which means they have to head to the elevator and buy lunch on the streets every day just like any other non-Googler. Meanwhile, further downtown on Wall Street, MBA grads who recently won jobs at the crashed-and-burned Bear Stearns won't get them. The company has rescinded its offers, reports SAI. But JPMorgan Chase — the company that bailed out Bear Stearns — will still pay the no-longer-needed new hires their promised $50,000 to $60,000 relocation bonuses and offer them career services.

A select few of the 300 DoubleClick employees Google laid off yesterday will be placed into "transitional roles" and offered contract positions, reports the WSJ. That's not much of a reprieve. Google HR makes contractors sign agreements to abide by strict rules. They're not allowed to " use massage chairs, videogames, pool tables, foosball tables or other entertainment facilities on Google's campus," according to one such agreement leaked to us. Probably won't get to eat the food, either. Read the whole thing below:

Google plans to sell DoubleClick's search engine marketing division. "Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to our mission and core to the trust we ask from our users," Google's DoubleClick integration boss Tom Phillips wrote on the company's blog. In the '80s, Phillips ran a magazine called Spy which would have skewered him for such carefully groomed language. [WSJ]

NEW YORK — Google laid off around 300 DoubleClick employees today, one still with the company told me this afternoon. We were standing outside DoubleClick's headquarters at 111 8th Avenue in Chelsea, where I spent the afternoon asking DoubleClick employees how their day went.

We reported Google layoffs at DoubleClick would start yesterday, but they only began today. Why? A DoubleClick employee said that Google pushed the cuts back "because yesterday was April Fools' Day." Ah, make the peons wait a day while Larry and Sergey have their fun. A quaintly botched approximation of mercy, no doubt. Today, our source tells us: "People are getting calls and start crying when they are told that are being let go." Would they have laughed if they'd been told yesterday?

Google layoffs at DoubleClick, the online-advertising tech company based in New York that it just acquired, began a day later than expected. Today, among others, the entire finance team was shown the door. It's a bright, sunny day in New York; a good start for ex-DoubleClickers' four-month vacation. Google's severance package: two months' pay plus another two if they sign a noncompete agreement, a Google source told Vanity Fair. No wonder Google wants them off the market: Yahoo and other online-advertising rivals are actively recruiting DoubleClick veterans. (Photo by stobor)

A tipster with two friends at DoubleClick tells us Google will cut DoubleClick's staff by 15 percent, trimming the sales teams that push Dart for Advertisers and Dart for Publishers by 20 percent. Google plans to give those ad-targeting services to its advertisers for free, making money on brokering ads. Most of the rest headed for the door are general staff whose functions overlap with Google's administrative workers.