Google's crazy growth

Articles about Google's rapid growth are in the news daily.

"Google to set shop in Russia; to hire 3,000" reads a headline on India's Rediff.com portal Web site on Tuesday. The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal reports that the search giant is looking for 1 million square feet of office space near its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

Google has more than 4,000 full-time employees, including more than 700 it hired in the second quarter, the Business Journal report from Friday said. And BusinessWeek Online had a story, also on Friday, titled "Revenge Of The Nerds -- Again" about how Google and Yahoo are snapping up engineering talent from universities and competitors.

In the second quarter alone, Google hired about 230 engineers, including Louis Monier, director of eBay's advanced technology research, and Kai-Fu Lee, a top researcher at Microsoft, the article said. The Lee hiring prompted Microsoft to sue Lee and Google for alleged violation of a noncompete agreement. Google countersued and a judge last week barred Lee temporarily from performing the search and China market-related duties he was hired for.

"What's behind this talent raid?...These guys--and they are truly mostly men--are also attracted to the massive, unsolved technical challenges facing search companies, which affect hundreds of millions of people daily," the article says. And then there are the stock options which have made billionaires out of many Google employees...