A new hire at Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) may be telegraphing the next target of the world's leading search engine.

Stephanie Tilenius is the newest Googler, a webpreneur who spent the last few years at eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) after co-founding PlanetRX.com during the pre-bubble dot-com days.

Tilenius went through several executive hats at eBay, filling leadership positions at eBay Motors, PayPal, and eBay.com itself before leaving to pursue new career opportunities last September. That path now finds her at Big G.

Google is unlikely to launch an eBay.com clone or begin pitching used cars. Beyond MercadoLibre (NASDAQ:MELI) in Latin America, fee-charging auction sites are mostly a dying breed. There are several niche-specific sites on the move, but a behemoth like eBay is left with little choice but to push into fixed-price listings to take on Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN). Free ad-supported listings are a more logical product offering, but if Google Base and Google Products never really gained traction, how will the company succeed in e-commerce beyond its plum role as the Internet's top lead generator?

Tilenius also helped build PayPal's merchant services from the ground up; that's where her talents will most likely be put to good use. Google is great in many areas, but Google Checkout remains a laggard. Even this early in Checkout's run, the service is clearly no PayPal killer.

More than $20 billion in payment volume changed hands through PayPal during its most recent quarter. No one else even comes close. Taking on PayPal was hard enough when the platform was young; just ask the pool of vanquished rivals, including Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO), Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC), and Citigroup's (NYSE:C) C2it. It will be all but impossible to take down now.

We can always keep an eye on Tilenius's LinkedIn profile to see what hat she ultimately wears at Google, but she hasn't updated it in ages. She's still listed as working for eBay, and she's been out for five months.

Either way, it never hurts for Google to have another web-savvy veteran on board. Let's just hope that the search giant has realistic expectations for Google Checkout's future.

What would it take to knock off PayPal? Shares your perspective in the comment below.