Google earnings beat Wall Street targets

Analysts also pointed to a 16 per cent jump in "paid clicks" on Google's search advertisements, while earnings handily surpassed expectations despite hiring at a near-record pace and a one-third jump in operating costs.

Shares of Baidu, the No. 1 search engine in China, rose 2.8 per cent to $100.99 following Google's results. Google has lost market share in China this year, following a spat with Beijing over censorship that resulted in Google relocating its search site to Hong Kong.

Google's stock has underperformed the broader market in 2010, partly because the company's growth prospects appeared to be slowing amid increasing competition from social networking powerhouse Facebook, which counts more than 500 million users.

On Wednesday, Facebook and Microsoft unveiled improvements to Microsoft's Bing search engine that incorporate personalized Facebook data, such as restaurant recommendations from a person's friends, into search results.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who participated in Thursday's earnings conference call for the first time in several quarters, said the company was also working to make its search results more personal.

Google has been on an acquisition spree, buying more than 20 companies in 2010, including several companies that were developing social networking technology.

The company added more than 1,500 employees to its payroll in the third quarter - which some analysts said was a record pace for the company - and its operating expenses totaled $2.19 billion, up from $1.64 billion in the year-ago quarter.

CFO Pichette said the Internet industry was waging a "war for talent." He added that its YouTube online video site was now "monetizing" over 2 billion views a week, a rise of 50 percent from a year earlier

The world's largest Internet search engine posted a third-quarter net income of $2.17 billion or $7.64 a share, excluding items, surpassing Wall Street's average estimate of $6.69 a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

« ‹ 1 2