Misleading title. They only did layoffs at DoubleClick, typical for a merger.

Not that typical in a merger, especially a "growth seeking" merger (like what Google does) vs "cost cutting" merger, like what Oracle does.

This is unusual for Google, for sure. What that tells about them (i.e growth expectations etc) is anyone guess ...

I disagree. I think this is very typical. This is Google's largest acquisition and one of the the few that isn't a startup.

When a company does an acquisition of this size there is bound to be numerous redundancies, specifically in the HR department.

For another example consider EMC and RSA.

The article reminded me of the comedy "translation" of Adobe's aquisition of Macromedia done some years ago. http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translation