Make Money Online

Google’s voracious appetite for new hires has eased off for the first time since the company went public in August 2004. In the last three months, the search giant added only 6 percent, or 889 people, to its employee roster–bringing Google’s worldwide headcount to 16,805, according to the company’s latest quarterly filing released Thursday.

That percentage is down nearly a third from the previous quarter’s hires (2,130 new employees from June 2007 to September 2007) and off a third of its average quarterly hiring rate since June 2004, according to CNET News.com calculations.

During the company’s quarterly conference call Thursday,…

Google on Thursday said its fourth-quarter revenue rose more than 50 percent and profit rose 17 percent, but the figures were just short of Wall Street expectations. Shares were down more than 8 percent in after-hours trading as a result.

Meanwhile, executives said their business had not been affected by any slowdown in the U.S. economy, despite worries of spending cuts in online advertising during an economic downturn. In fact, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told analysts in a conference call that he is optimistic about 2008 based on “ad dollars continuing to move from offline to online, a trend which…

European regulators are expected to approve Google’s proposed acquisition of online ad firm DoubleClick in February despite circulation of a threat assessment report, according to a research note released Thursday by Stifel Nicolaus.

Google was given the go-ahead by U.S. regulators late last year, but it’s still waiting for approval from the European Union.

Staff members in the competition department of the European Commission have prepared a draft “Statement of Objection” that assesses how the takeover could pose threats to competition. “It is a necessary, but not sufficient, step in the EC merger review process,” the analyst note says.

European…

In the last few months, both Google and eBay unit PayPal have quietly rolled out new online-payment solutions that specifically target Internet-based political-campaign contributions.

While the companies primarily pitch their new products as methods for “attracting more supporters” and “increasing online giving to your campaign,” the Internet titans have also laid the groundwork for phishing-resistant campaign contributions.

Google Checkout for Political Contributions

In a research paper released last year, Markus Jakobsson, Oliver Friedrichs, and I wrote about the looming threat of phishing Web sites posing as legitimate political-campaign sites.

The phishing problem is a particular threat to campaign sites,…

Google may not have monopoly power, but it certainly has monopoly mind share. As The New York Times reports, Google’s search market share has jumped from 58 percent in March 2006 to 65.1 percent today. Yahoo? Less than one-third of Google’s share. Microsoft? Less than one-ninth.

Monopoly? Not in the ordinary sense of the word. Google may well be aiming for a data monopoly to keep us close forever and ever, but for now it just has a brand monopoly that keeps users on its site, feeding it ever-increasing mountains of data.

We are feeding the beast, in other words.…