The battle of the search giants is playing out in the news and the blogosphere lately with news of staffing changes at both Yahoo and Google.
Yahoo just announced that they will be laying off 1% of their workforce — or about 135 of their 13,600 employees — with the official comment,
“
The personnel changes we are making are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo! for revenue growth and margin expansion and to support our strategy to deliver differentiated products and experiences to the marketplace. We’ll continue to hire on a global basis to support our key priorities.”
This comes on the heels of a larger Yahoo layoff in December when Yahoo cut it’s staff by 4% over the holidays.
Meanwhile, Google has announced that 2011 will be it’s biggest hiring year in company history with plans to add more than 6,000 jobs this year. And this is on the heals of adding 4,500 jobs in 2010. Alan Eustace had this to say on the official Google blog:
“I love Google because of our people. It’s inspiring to be part of the team. And that’s why I am excited about 2011—because it will be our biggest hiring year in company history. We’re looking for top talent—across the board and around the globe—and we’ll hire as many smart, creative people as we can to tackle some of the toughest challenges in computer science: like building a web-based operating system from scratch, instantly searching an index of more than 100 million gigabytes and even developing cars that drive themselves.”
This new wave of hiring will bring Google’s number of employees to over 30,000. Predictions of Google’s death have been circulating for years. From the latest news at Google HQ it appears that these rumors are now, like then, greatly exaggerated.