Kara and Walt Visit Google in Dublin

It’s not all luxury hotels, rolling green hills and Guinness here on our trip to Dublin, Ireland, to look for a place to possibly hold an international version of D: All Things Digital, which we are calling EuroD.

You can see videos of Walt Mossberg and me undertaking that arduous effort (visits to Dublin Castle, fancy hotels in the city of Dublin, a stroll in the streets and a trip to the Wicklow Mountains to see a bit of the lovely Irish countryside.

But we also went to visit the Dublin offices of Google, which has its biggest facility–outside of its Mountain View Googleplex headquarters in California–here in the Docklands section of the city, with 1,300 employees. We got a tour of the facility from John Herlihy, who is director of online sales and operations for Google’s European operations.

The search giant has grown its presence here in Ireland, like a lot of other U.S. Web and tech companies, including Dell, Apple, eBay, Amazon, IBM and many others, because of its educated and multinational population and the country’s digitally friendly government.

Here’s a video of our tour by Herlihy, where we talked about innovation in Europe, explored new Web trends and, of course, encountered those same annoying exercise balls as at Google’s California HQ. While futile, I know, it is my personal goal to eliminate them entirely from the corporate ethos for their sheer irksome “Googley-ness.”

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.