Google Buys a New Startup Every Week

Eric Schmidt estimates that, these days, Google buys a new startup every week. While big buys like YouTube create lots of buzz, we don’t even hear about many of Google’s smaller acquisitions.

Bad news for top-down media: Google won’t buy them away from their inevitable oblivion. “We made a decision to focus primarily on user-generated content, and not on businesses where we would own the content,” Schmidt said. Indeed, their new tagline — search, ads, and apps — indicates a cycle of enabling (through apps), tapping (through search), and monetizing (through ads) user-generated content.

Note that they just began a recruiting drive, too. As the global rate of information creation explodes, Google seems bent on hypergrowth to fulfill its mission: to organize and make useful (vis-a-vis, monetize) the world’s information.