Shares in Google jumped in after-hours trading on Wall Street last night after the internet search giant unveiled a 46 per cent surge in profits for the third quarter of the year.

The performance outstripped ambitious Wall Street forecasts that had helped to lift Google’s shares by 19 per cent over the previous four weeks.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, said the group made $1.07 billion (£520 million) in profits after tax during the three months to the end of September, compared with $733.4 million for the same period the year before.

Revenue jumped 57 per cent to $4.23 billion. The company has beaten Wall Street estimates in almost every quarterly period since it floated in August 2004 and has seen its shares increase sevenfold.

Mr Schmidt said: “We are very pleased with the impressive growth we experienced across our business.”

The company is thriving because more advertisers are shifting spending to the internet, where Google has built a system to approach prospective customers. When Google processes a search request, it scans through its database for adverts that are related to the same topic as the query and displays them.

Google gets paid every time someone clicks on an advert on its pages or one of its partners’ sites. It fields about 1.2 billion searches a day, four times as many as Yahoo!, its nearest rival.

Yesterday, the group said that it had relied on the UK for 16 per cent of its revenue during the quarter, about $661 milllion. Overall, 48 per cent of its sales are derived from outside America.

Operating expenses hit $1.25 billion, or 30 per cent of revenue, growing faster than the size of its workforce, which grew 15 per cent to 15,916 employees during the three months. In the second quarter of the year, Google shocked investors when expenses shot to 31 per cent of revenue from 27 per cent in the first quarter.

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