Google profits surge as revenues leap 70%

Google has underlined its dominance of the search engine market by almost doubling profits in its third quarter on the back of strong advertising sales.

Its earnings for the three months to September reached $733m (£390m), compared with $381m (£202m) for the same period last year – an increase of more than 90%. The company’s revenues rose 70% from a year ago to $2.7bn (£1.4bn).

The figures come a week after Google bought YouTube for $1.65bn. Chief executive Eric Schmidt says: "Business is very, very good here at Google. We’ve had an excellent quarter in all respects, especially internationally."

The company has been expanding its search empire to create ventures such as Google Maps, Google News and its price comparison site Froogle.

It has also extended its lead in number of Web searches over Yahoo! and Microsoft. The number of searches made using Google in September rose by 24% on last year to 2.83 billion queries, giving the company a 50% share of the US market.