A tipster with two friends at DoubleClick tells us Google will cut DoubleClick's staff by 15 percent, trimming the sales teams that push Dart for Advertisers and Dart for Publishers by 20 percent. Google plans to give those ad-targeting services to its advertisers for free, making money on brokering ads. Most of the rest headed for the door are general staff whose functions overlap with Google's administrative workers.

The DoubleClick employees told our source that Google leadership did a "totem pole" ranking of all DoubleClick employees to determine whom to cut; in this variation of forced ranking, every employee gets assigned a number representing his value to the organization, and the lowest get the axe. The office is "very tense," our source tells us, "very tense and anxious." If the results from our latest poll are to be believed, that's because over 68 percent of them are worried they're going to have to work at Google.

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