Google, the Internet's leading search engine, announced Monday that it is buying popular online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Wow...That's just rediculous. 1.65 Billion dollars for a freakin' video clip hosting website. What is this world coming to! OMG :-)

Bill Tancer, general manger of global research of Hitwise, said after the deal was announced that MySpace would now probably need to promote its own video service more aggressively on its site in order to compete with a combined Google-YouTube.

And Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with Global Crown Capital, said that Google's purchase of YouTube could be viewed as a preemptive strike against Yahoo, which has been rumored to be in talks to purchase social networking site Facebook.

In a statement, Google said YouTube will operate as an independent unit of Google once the deal closes and will retain the YouTube brand name. The companies added that no YouTube workers will lose their jobs as a result of the acquisition and that Google will maintain its own online video business.