Make Money Online

European antitrust regulators on Tuesday approved Google’s $3.1 billion merger with DoubleClick, paving the way for a blockbuster deal in Internet search and publisher-based advertising tools.

Approval by the European Commission, which came without conditions, had largely been expected to occur this week. The Commission’s announcement comes three weeks before its April 2 deadline, in which it had to determine whether to nix the deal.

With the Commission’s decision in place, Google announced on Tuesday that it has formally closed its merger with DoubleClick.

“We are thrilled that our acquisition of DoubleClick has closed,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said…

Google described on Tuesday how it secures the mountains of data that it handles every day, saying that it has highly automated processes and employs the best and brightest in Web security.

On the Official Google Blog, Douglas Merrill, a vice president of engineering, spelled out the company’s philosophy, processes, and technology that the company employs for security.

He said that the company is developing its own security software, particularly to address areas such as large-scale computing and automation.

Google’s processes are set up so that sensitive personal information can only be viewed by exception, Merrill said.

“We carefully manage…

After ComScore reported a recent decline in Google’s paid clicks, the Net ratings service followed up, noting evidence that the drop was due to “Google’s own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings and, therefore, the opportunity for paid clicks to occur.”

The reduction in listings, ComScore noted, was “offset by paid revenue per click.”

On Monday, at a Bear Stearns media conference in Palm Beach, Fla., Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of advertising and commerce in North America, offered essentially the same view on the matter.

As noted by ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry…

John Mark Walker, Hyperic’s community lead, has an interesting take on whether Google deserves to be loved or loathed for its open-source community outreach.

John Mark is in the former camp and, increasingly, so am I. Google is the Teflon open-source company, contributing selectively and strategically…and winning kudos across the board.

Self-interested Google? Absolutely. But then, how many companies do you know that aren’t self-interested contributors to open source? Walker notes:

I didn’t say they were altruistic, but rather that they knew what they were doing with respect to community development. They invest in communities, many of them related to

…

Ex-Googler start-ups are coming out of the woodworks. And now there’s one more.

Steffen Mueller, an ex-Google product manager from Munich, Germany, has launched his own version of Web search with a dash of the social. Mueller and a few friends from Germany started Topicle, which launched in beta on Monday.

The site lets anyone create or edit their own search engine on any topic–recipes, mortgage news, New York City or even peanut butter. People create a search topic and then choose the Web addresses from which Topicle will search. (Topicle uses Google search APIs to produce its search results.)…