Google has made its first large-scale redundancies, chopping 200 staff from its sales and marketing divisions.

The company said that it has grown very quickly and some duplication of roles has occurred as a result. Google is making the layoffs to streamline its organisation.

"So today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organisations by just under 200 globally," said a posting on the company blog.

"Making changes of this kind is never easy, and we recognise that the recession makes the timing even more difficult for the Googlers concerned. We did look at a number of different options, but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organisations in order to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a business."

The company has not specified exactly which global regions will be hit by the layoffs, but it is thought that the bulk will be made in the US since regional teams overseas are already fairly tightly organised.

Employees are reported to be getting a 60-day consultancy period during which they can apply for other jobs within the company before getting a severance package.

Google is still posting good financial results, but is the latest in a long line of major technology firms cutting jobs in the expectation of a worsening economic climate.