Google Chief Exec Hails “Extraordinary” Performance

by Stephen Logan on 22nd January 2010

The chief executive of Google has lauded the economic performance of the search engine, after seeing revenue soar in the last quarter of the year.

Eric Schmidt pointed out that the global economy has still not recovered, but Google has managed to post a 17 per cent increase in revenue between October and December 2009, which he described as "extraordinary".

When compared to figures for the same period in 2008, the trading update shows clear year-on-year growth, with revenue rising from $5.7 billion (£3.5 billion) to $6.67 billion and net profit going from $382 million to $1.97 billion – although the 2008 net profit includes a $1 billion write-down.

Mr Schmidt said: "Our performance in 2009 underscored the strength of our management team, the resilience of our business model and the pace of innovation within our product and engineering teams."

Google recently described how it is trying to improve its search engine’s understanding of synonyms and highlighted certain tools for disambiguation on its results pages.