Google’s Q1 2008 Grows 31%; Sticks it to comScore

Well so much for the comScore numbers!

While the research company had Wall Street in a panic, with its 1.8% paid click prediction for the quarter, Google tore that number to shreds with a whopping 20% growth in paid clicks!

Here are the full numbers from MarketWatch…

[Google] said net income for the period ended March 31 rose to $1.31 billion, or $4.12 a share, from $1 billion, or $3.18 a share, in the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, revenue rose to $5.19 billion from $3.66 billion.

Excluding special items, Google said earnings for the period were $4.84 a share. Net revenue, or revenue minus payments made to other sites to acquire Internet traffic, came in at $3.7 billion. Analysts had estimated Google would post earnings excluding special items of $4.55 a share and net revenue of $3.61 billion, according to FactSet Research.

While its 31% net income and 20% paid click growth is down, compared to last year, it’s way better than we’d expected out of GOOG.

“Our ongoing innovation in search, ads, and apps helped drive healthy growth globally across our product lines, yielding another strong quarter,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in the press release.

And here we were thinking the search engine didn’t know what it was doing, when it took measures to cut back on invalid clicks. It just goes to show, that you can never bet against Google.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the numbers. Impressed? Disappointed? Will you trust comScore in the future?