Feb 4, 2011 09:26 GMT  ·  By

Last week, Google announced that it plans to hire more people than ever in 2011. It wants to add at least 6,000 more people, for a total of over 30,000, by the end of the year. Despite the perceived shortage of engineers in Silicon Valley, Google got 75,000 job applications in the past week alone, setting a new record.

Google's blog posts are fairly read, it's one of the biggest web companies out there after all, but it seems that this one announcing its desire to expand really sparked the interests of many would be Googlers.

Bloomberg reports that Google got 75,000 applications since the post went up, 15 percent more than the previous record in 2007, still the year when Google grew the most in terms of new employees.

Google had close to 25,000 employees at the end of 2010. It hired 4,500 in the last year alone, either directly or via acquisitions. But it's looking to grow even faster this year, it wants to blow past the 30,000 employees mark.

"I am excited about 2011—because it will be our biggest hiring year in company history. We’re looking for top talent—across the board and around the globe—and we’ll hire as many smart, creative people as we can," Alan Eustace, SVP of engineering and research at Google, wrote last week.

Interestingly enough, one Google employee registered the hiybbprqag.com domain which now redirects to the Google Jobs Page. If you've been following the latest showdown between Google and Microsoft, you'll know that this was one of the terms used by Google to determine whether Bing was copying results.

The company is focused on several areas where it plans to grow, mobile being the prime target. Google is said to be looking for a large number of mobile app developers to start building better native applications for mobiles, either related to its services or completely new ones.