Search engine giant Google announced a deal to buy online video pioneer YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Google?s stock rose as the deal was expected to go ahead.

Shares increased two percent to finish at $429 on the NASDAQ Stock Market.

YouTube has achieved major success over the past 19 months, from a simple website that two friends set up in a garage to a company providing online video services for to up to 100 million visitors a day.

"The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement, according to the AFP.

YouTube?s online web site will continue to operate independently from Google?s video service.

Chad Hurley, a co-founder of YouTube, said that YouTube agreed to Google?s acquisition because YouTube believed that with Google?s resources and engineers, their dream of having the best video web site available could come true.

Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has developed to a $1 billion-company.

The story of YouTube resembles that of Google.

Steve Chen, 28, and Chad Hurley, 29, co-workers at PayPal, decided in January 2005 they wanted to share photographs and video clips with their friends online.

When they encountered difficulty sending video clips as email attachments, they tried hard to work out an alternative way of sharing their files with friends.

Following their test videos first launched in May, YouTube.com started its service in December as an official web site.

o.O are you sure? How credible is your source?

Not that I dislike Google, actually I love Google, but I hope they havn't actually bought YouTube... that would just be.. well.. annoying.