If you can't beat 'em, you may as well buy 'em.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is buying Tatter and Company, the company behind South Korea's popular Textcube blogging platform, according to one of the acquired company's co-CEOs.

Blogging isn't new to Google. It acquired Blogger.com before blogging went mainstream. Asian acquisitions, on the other hand, are foreign to Big G.

Google isn't like its nearest rival. Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) has dived into smart foreign investments with aplomb. Earlier this year, roughly half of Yahoo!'s market cap was justified by investments in Yahoo! Japan, China's Alibaba, and South Korea's Gmarket (NASDAQ:GMKT). Google is no stranger to buyouts, but it has typically shown restraint if its mergers and acquisitions team has to get passports stamped.

That may change. Google hasn't been able to close the gap in China with market leader Baidu.com (NASDAQ:BIDU). Google may be beating Yahoo! in the U.S., but it's a different story in Japan, where Yahoo!'s early bird partnership with Softbank has helped make Yahoo! Japan a dot-com titan

In Asia, it usually pays to have local partners. Just ask eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY), which has bowed out of Japan and China, and is supposedly in talks to acquire a chunk of Gmarket.

It's not always the solution, but for now at least, the international growth strategy for any major dot-com is fairly simple: If you can't bury the competition, buy the competition.  

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