Google has suggested that the advertising market is beginning to return to normal, after announcing profits of nearly $2bn for the last three months of what it called a "rollercoaster year".
Announcing its latest quarterly financial results, the company said that it had received a substantial boost in the period from October to December 2009 - pushing profit for the quarter to $1.97bn.
That figure came on the back of a 17% year on year growth in revenues, up to $6.67bn from $5.7bn during the same period in 2008. Led chief executive Eric Schmidt to make an optimistic assessment of the current state of affairs.
"Given that the global economy is still in the early days of recovery, this was an extraordinary end to the year," he 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, which continued unabated throughout the downturn."
While profit was higher than Wall Street analysts had expected, however, there was disappointment that revenue growth was not higher - an example, perhaps, of Google suffering from the weight of expectation.
"All of those things they report at a basic level were fine," Martin Pyykkonen, senior analyst at Janco Partners, told Reuters. "The reason the stock is down is that it wasn't a blowout. I think the stock will recover. I don't think it will fall through the floor."
In Britain, one of Google's most important markets outside the US, revenues came to $772m - the same proportion of the company's income as it was this time a year ago. At that point, the internet giant was pushing through the deepest trough of the recession - cutting jobs and axing new projects.
In a conference call with reporters and analysts, Google executives said that they were now investing heavily in the future, with substantial efforts in search, the social web, mobile phones and the company's suite of business offerings.
Asked about the company's conflict with the Chinese government - which some have worried could end up with the company frozen out of the world's biggest new market - Schmidt remained relatively quiet.
"In a reasonably short time we'll be making some changes there," he said, indicating that the company would press ahead with its threat to uncensor the Chinese version of its search engine in protest at attempts by local hackers to break into its systems.
Shares in Google dropped 5% in after hours trading.
