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That Global Cheer You Just Heard Its For Googles Earnings

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by Kevin Maney
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Oct 16 2008 4:47pm EDT

That Global Cheer You Just Heard? It's For Google's Earnings

Kevin Maney writes: Just when we needed it, Google defied the economy and the odds and reported a solid, good-as-expected performance for the third quarter. Analysts had expected about $4.75 per share. Excluding some special costs, earnings were $4.93 per share.


All the various results get confusing, but in the end Google brought in revenue after advertising commissions of $4.04 billion, which was within a tiny rounding error of analysts' estimates.

The flip side, though, is that for the past month analysts had been downgrading their expectations -- so Google hit targets that had been set lower.

"We had a good third quarter with strong traffic and revenue growth across all of our major geographies thanks to the underlying strength of our core search and ads business," CEO Eric Schmidt said. "While we are realistic about the poor state of the global economy, we will continue to manage Google for the long term, driving improvements to search and ads, while also investing in future growth areas such as enterprise, mobile, and display."

Google shares closed up about 4% today, but as of this writing are up another 8% in after-hours trading.

All in all, this has got to help everybody calm down. If Google had taken a dive, no doubt panic about the Internet and its reliance on advertising models would have ensued. Google didn't knock it out of the park, but its business seems to be on reasonably solid footing.

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