Google recently announced that they have agreed to purchase DoubleClick for 3.1B from two private equity firms. Not a bad return for the private equity firms who took DoubleClick private in April of 2005 for just 1.1B.

DoubleClick is the largest provider of online ad technology. They help advertisers to purchase and track online advertising across the Internet and enable publishers with large amounts of traffic to sell their site's ad inventory and track that as well.

In June of 2004 DoubleClick acquired Performics, an affiliate network and management company and search engine marketing agency in an all cash deal totaling between $58M and $65M.

Now, seemingly in an effort to acquire the DART ad technologies and publisher relationships, Google has also acquired an affiliate network and search engine marketing agency that consequently gets paid by their customers to help them perform better in Google.

Google recently dipped their toes into the affiliate business with the launch of their CPA advertisements through the AdSense network, but clearly the ownership of a search marketing agency could be a huge conflict of interest for the search giant.

So what will happen to Performics? That is going to be the hot question floating around the affiliate community. Will Google integrate the affiliate network and search agency into their business or spin them off?

My guess is that Performics will be spun off or acquired. Perhaps AOL will scuttle their Tradedoubler deal when they see a Gem like Performics on the block.

What do you think? Should Search Engines be allowed to own an SEO and SEM company?